Day 346 - Tolstoy & Artificial Intelligence
This morning, I saw a bit of a video of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at their annual AI conference. The first thing that turned me off was the number of people in the room… 319,000 people attended the conference… so at least few thousand must have been at this particular event. I have an aversion of many people gathered to worship one thing - whatever that thing is. It is something that has stayed me from living in a Communist country. For me the same thing goes for religion, work, etc. If there is a group of two sheep somewhere, I will not be the third one. And then, there is of course that thing that I am one of those trying to stay away from AI. At least for now. I know it is coming, it is actually here… but I will resist for now.
Speaking just for myself, as an estate planning lawyer I can absolutely see the use of AI in Estate Planning - to draft documents, to do legal research, etc. But there is one thing I don’t see AI being able to do - navigating human relationships and family dynamics. I think that as an estate planning lawyer the most important thing I need to be good at is to work with people, to have a heart to help people, to know how to help people navigate important for them relationships in difficult times. There are no master’s degrees in that… It takes life experience, humanity, and certain maturity to be able to do that well and I don’t think that AI at least for now can replace me. AI can do instead of me things I can learn or have learned as far as additional knowledge – rules, regulations, “when this happens, we use this petition”, etc. But AI cannot teach me how to be a human and how to work with people.
In the 1878 book Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And my observation has been… I am yet to meet a happy family in my everyday life or in my life as an estate planning lawyer. And that is the beauty of life. What does happy even mean?!? We all have good days, bad days, and we move forward. As a professional, I think people who are best at their jobs are not those that do the best research or the best legal analysis, but those who can work with people. That is what I am experiencing as a lawyer, and that is what I have experienced in my previous professional lives. Most people I work with these days are either planning for when they will be gone - not a happy topic, or they are reaching out to me in a moment of loss, so I can help them navigate life, family relationships, and their legal affairs. I just don’t see how AI could do that - hold someone’s hand (literally and not literally) in such difficult moments in life. Or maybe some people might like to have their hands held by a robot. I don’t know… not me.