Futurist: Lawyers Will Become Obsolete This Year

A novelist and professional futurist predicts that (human) lawyers will be taken entirely out of contract law – well, we’re “headed there,” anyway – in about six months, and he says he wouldn’t be surprised if computerized systems replace the legal apparatus one day. In WIRED magazine’s “Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy” podcast, science fiction writer Karl Schroeder described how that phenomenon is reflected in his new book – though the book also describes a civilization that uses synchronized cryonics to communicate with other planets. But, he argues, artificial intelligence replacing human lawyers might be one way around errors or fraud: “[A computer would] follow the rules that have been laid down for it to the letter. It will never cheat.”