Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 639-640

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
…
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs.
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
Published: March 4, 2011
AAA

It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

…

We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

Degrees and Dollars

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times

Published: March 6, 2011

(Emphasis JS)