The last time I had the privilege to write to you on the topic of artificial intelligence, I shared with you that AI was going to become a mainstay in our profession.
I also shared with you that the onus was on us to learn as much as we could about AI and get ourselves ready for the inevitability of the major changes that would have an impact on the legal industry.
AI, though not yet fully mainstream, has been bolted and now embedded, not just in the legal industry, but in almost every area of modern life.
It is in health care (physical and mental health systems), it is in educational systems from elementary to university levels. It is in the military industry and the transportation industry.
We can use AI tools in almost every aspect of our lives, from driving (Tesla’s self-driving technology has recorded 8 billion miles of driving hours taking drivers to their destinations without major invention from humans) to learning vibe coding, a growing trend where developers use large language models to generate functional computer code by simply describing what one needs in plain language instead of manually writing every line.
The industry is developing at an unprecedented rate. The iterations of the chatbots are being released at warp speed. There is a global race among countries to lead in AI initiatives. The race is expected to be multi-decades-long and different regions tend to excel and operate with distinct standards.
The U.S. currently holds the top position in overall AI ecosystem strength, with China as a formidable competitor in second place. Saudi Arabia is holding steady in third place with global computer power South Korea in fourth. France holds the fifth position and India comes in sixth.
Since my last article on AI more than two years ago, some forerunners have emerged.
On the infrastructure front, Nvidia Corp. is the leading manufacturer of graphics processing units, the hardware needed for AI data centers, on the end user front. Consumers have Google/Alphabet with Gemini; Meta with Meta AI; OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT; Anthropic, developer of Claude; and xAI, known for the Grok chatbot.
Many unknowns remain. The jury is still out about whether AI will upend industries entirely. Can a robot complete tasks faster than any human? Is AI good? Is AI bad?
Many questions persist, and I unfortunately don’t have all the answers to the questions surrounding AI.
What I do know is that humans will be needed more times than not in all aspects of AI usage. In the future of AI it would be more important than ever before to inject what it means to be human into whatever tasks are before us to use AI to accomplish.
I also know that AI is a tool to be used to make our lives easier, a tool to be used to make our lives more efficient and a tool to be used to make our lives better.
Equally important, I hope that the emerging reality is for us to be mindful about what it means to be human and ensure that we humans use AI for forces of good.