Divided, Together

I’m at Atlanta-Hartsfield on a busy Thursday evening, and my goal is to walk a few dozen yards from Simply Books across the “A” concourse’s main hallway to the Chick-Fil-A. It’s a short but not a trivial journey — the wide hallway is packed from edge to edge with a swiftly moving river of thousands of travelers headed both left and right. It reminds me of that chaotic moment between classes in high school when everyone rushing to get to their next class before the bell rings, although with less flirting and more grim expressions.

Closest to me a thick stream of people is headed to the right, toward Gate 34, and beyond that a counterstream has set up headed in the opposite direction toward Gate 1. Drawing on experience in whitewater kayaking, I ease into the flow moving to my right and ferry across the current, crossing diagonally as I move ahead. I hit some crowd turbulence in front of restrooms, and use this to double back, picking up the counterflow, and eventually eddying out in the food court now on my right.

Academics have been studying crowd dynamics and collective motion for about a half-century. This arose partly because crowd dynamics sometimes go bad — notably at soccer matches in England, at pilgrimages in Saudi Arabia, and at rock concerts everywhere. Mayhem erupts, order breaks down, people get panicky, and deaths result — such as when more than 1,400 died in a pedestrian tunnel in Mecca in 1990.

Crowd researchers today often study this through computer simulations of crowds to better understand and better predict. Each person becomes a particle, like an atom moving independently but within a larger mass.

Each of these atoms is programmed with certain shared traits that govern interactions. With some cultural variations, each atom tries to keep a fairly standard distance from others as it moves, with that distance narrowing as the density of the crowd increases. (...)

When we walk down a crowded city sidewalk or a busy airport concourse, we seek the most efficient route while maintaining this bubble. This collective movement often naturally and economically breaks into two streams, one flowing each direction, like opposing schools of fish. (Americans tend to stream to the right; the left-driving British have a weak proclivity to veer left, but still often head to the right, which may explain why London streets often seem so vexing for Americans to navigate.)

At intersections and pinch points, these tidy streams are disrupted, and new patterns emerge. Researchers have found that syncopated flows often occur at busy pedestrian intersections, such as where two concourse corridors converge. One stream, say, from east to west will dominate until the pressure on the stymied south-to-north stream exceeds it, whereupon it will surge like a squeezed balloon, and halt the east-west flow until pressure builds again crosswise and another rebalancing occurs. Under less dense circumstances, sort of zig-zaggy stripes will emerge as the two crowds interweave and each person briefly tacks slightly away from their destination, as I did to get to the Chick-Fil-A in Atlanta.

This modeling mostly assumes each pedestrian is moving as an individual and seeking the most efficient route. But that’s often not the case in the real world. We often travel in groups — we’re less lone atoms than parts of molecules. Studies have found that a majority of pedestrians — about fifty percent on a weekday afternoon, or seventy percent on weekends — are part of a group, such as couples, families, or co-workers headed back from lunch.

by Wayne Curtis, The Smart Set |  Read more:

Image: Scott via Flickr

Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?

It is just before dawn at a hunting camp in Botswana’s game-rich northern savanna, and Robyn Waldrip is donning an ammunition belt that could double as a hernia girdle.

“You can’t help but feel like sort of a badass when you strap this thing on,” she says. Robyn, a Texan in her midthirties, seems to stand about six feet two, with piercing eyes of glacial blue shaded by about twelve swooping inches of eyelash. She’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts, and there is no part of her body, from the look of it, that you couldn’t crack a walnut on. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, Robyn described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.”

Robyn Waldrip could kick my ass, and also your ass, hopping on one leg. Her extensive résumé of exotic kills includes a kudu, a zebra, a warthog, and a giraffe. But she has never shot a Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, so before she sets out, her American guide, a professional hunter named Jeff Rann, conducts a three-minute tutorial on the art of killing the world’s largest land animal. (...)

Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team. A softhearted or lazy dog who lets the prey escape can catch a serious ass-kicking from the rest of the heavies in the pack. What’s that, Mr. Wild Dog? You’re on the endangered-species list? Well, karma is a bitch. Let’s move along.

Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath scabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. “Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad.

And there is the southern yellow-billed hornbill, and there the lilac-breasted roller, which, yes, are weird and beautiful to look upon, but if you had birds jabbering like that outside your window every morning, would you not spray them with a can of Raid?

Say what? I’m unfairly harshing the fauna? Yes, I know I am. I’m sorry. To the extent that I’ve discussed it with Jeff Rann and the Waldrips and other blood-sport folk I know, I believe that hunters are being sincere when they say they harbor no ill will toward the animals they shoot. Not being a hunter myself, I subscribe to an admittedly sissyish philosophy whereby I only wish brain-piercing bullets upon creatures I dislike. I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt coolly and transparently. But the thing is, I’m a little worried that some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathies might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. So I’m trying to muster up some prophylactic loathing for the animals out here. I want to be properly psyched when the elephant goes down. (...)

The elephant appears to be a trophy-caliber animal, but at this distance, it’s hard to say for sure. “One thing,” Jeff says to Robyn. “If it charges, we have to shoot him.”

“If he charges, I’m gonna shoot him,” Robyn says. The entourage begins a dainty heel-to-toe march into the spiky undergrowth. As it turns out, it is not one elephant but two. One is the big, old, shootable bull. The other is a younger male. Elephants never stop growing, a meliorative aspect of which (elephant-hunt-misgivings-wise) is that the mongo bulls that hunters most want to shoot also happen to be the oldest animals, usually within five or so years of mandatory retirement, when elephants lose their last set of molars and starve to death.

For the record, this detail does not soothe me as the guns make their way toward the elephants under the tree. I have not yet figured out how to dislike elephants enough to want to see one shot. In private treason against my hosts, I am thinking, Not now, not now. Let it please not get shot today.

by Wells Tower, GQ |  Read more:
Image: Rus Kashanov

comprehensive experiment by rafael rybczynski on Flickr.
via:

Pat Metheny

[ed. Someone asked me recently if there was someone I couldn't not see if they came to give a concert? The only person I could think of was Pat. Imagine what it took to conceive and compose just this one song (not to mention an entire album, equally as beautiful and complex.]

Paul du Toit, Thrill, 2007
via:

A Wider Goal

[ed. We don't usually report on current events much here (ie., politics), but this seems like a particularly insightful report on how foreign diplomacy actually works these days.]

The announcement that the U.S. government had secured the release of missing U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and that it was freeing five senior Taliban figures from Guantanamo Bay has been portrayed first and foremost as a prisoner exchange. But the four-year history of secret dialogue that led to Saturday's release suggests that the main goal of each side may have been far more sweeping.

It was about setting the stage for larger discussions on a future peaceful Afghanistan.

As The Associated Press first reported in 2011, talks about releasing the five senior Taliban reach back to at least late 2010, following nearly a decade of war. In the beginning, the name of Bergdahl, who was captured in mid-2009, was not even part of the equation.

The Taliban have sought a prisoner release from the beginning of their contacts with U.S. negotiators, while the U.S. side was looking for confidence-building gestures to keep the conversation going, with the ultimate aim of bringing hostilities in Afghanistan to an end. (...)

In either case, the deal that came about this week after such a long gestation was about more than six men and their respective paths toward captivity and now freedom.

by Kathy Gannon, AP |  Read more:

Image: AP uncredited

via:

Robert Nendza, 140308
via:

Charley Harper
via:

Anja Rubik for Exhibition Magazine March 2014 by Luigi & Daniele + Iango
via:

Scalpers Inc.

Early in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent. There was pandemonium: some stocks in the Dow were trading for prices as low as 1 cent, others for prices as high as $100,000, in both cases with no apparent rationale. A 15-minute period saw a loss of roughly $1 trillion in market capitalisation.

So far, so weird, but it wasn’t as if nothing like this had ever happened before. Strange things happen in markets, often with no obvious trigger other than mass hysteria; there’s a good reason one of the best books about the history of finance is called Manias, Panics and Crashes. What was truly bizarre and unprecedented, though, was what happened next. Just as quickly as the market had collapsed, it recovered. Prices bounced back, and at the end of a twenty-minute freak-out, the Dow was back where it began. It’s the end of the world! Oh wait, no, it’s just a perfectly normal Thursday.

This incident became known as the Flash Crash. The official report from the Securities and Exchange Commission blamed a single badly timed and unhelpfully large stock sale for the crash, but that explanation failed to convince informed observers. Instead, many students of the market blamed a new set of financial techniques and technologies, collectively known as high-frequency trading or flash trading. This argument rumbles on, and attribution of responsibility is still hotly contested. The conclusion, which becomes more troubling the more you think about it, is that nobody entirely understands the Flash Crash.

The Flash Crash was the first moment in the spotlight for high-frequency trading. This new type of market activity had grown to such a degree that most share markets were now composed not of humans buying and selling from one another, but of computers trading with no human involvement other than in the design of their algorithms. By 2008, 65 per cent of trading on public stock markets in the US was of this type. Actual humans buying and selling made up only a third of the market. Computers were (and are) trading shares in thousandths of a second, exploiting tiny discrepancies in price to make a guaranteed profit. Beyond that, though, hardly anybody knew any further details – or rather, the only people who did were the people who were making money from it, who had every incentive to keep their mouths shut. The Flash Crash dramatised the fact that public equity markets, whose whole rationale is to be open and transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious.

Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a thriller, and indeed is organised as one, featuring a hero whose mission is to solve a mystery. The hero is a Canadian banker called Brad Katsuyama, and the mystery is, on the surface of it, a simple one. Katsuyama’s job involved buying and selling stocks. The problem was that when he sat at his computer and tried to buy a stock, its price would change at the very moment he clicked to execute the trade. The apparent market price was not actually available. He raised the issue with the computer people at his bank, who first tried to blame him, and then when he demonstrated the problem – they watched while he clicked ‘Enter’ and the price changed – went quiet.

Katsuyama came to realise that his problem was endemic across the financial industry. The price was not the price. The picture of the market given by stable prices moving across screens was an illusion; the real market was not available to him. Very many people across the industry must have asked themselves what the hell was going on, but what’s unusual about Katsuyama is that he didn’t let the question go: he kept going until he found an answer. Part of that answer came in correctly formulating the question, what the hell is the market anyway?

The market was by now a pure abstraction. There was no obvious picture to replace the old one people carried around in their heads. The same old ticker tape ran across the bottom of television screens – even though it represented only a tiny fraction of the actual trading. Market experts still reported from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, even though trading no longer happened there. For a market expert truly to get inside the New York Stock Exchange, he’d need to climb inside a tall black stack of computer servers locked inside a fortress guarded by a small army of heavily armed men and touchy German shepherds in Mahwah, New Jersey. If he wanted an overview of the stock market – or even the trading in a single company like IBM – he’d need to inspect the computer printouts from twelve other public exchanges scattered across northern New Jersey, plus records of the private deals that occurred inside the growing number of dark pools. If he tried to do this, he’d soon learn that there was no computer printout. At least no reliable one. It didn’t seem possible to form a mental picture of the new financial market.

We want a market to be people buying and selling to and from each other, in a specific physical location, ideally with visible prices. In this new market, the principal actors are not human beings, but algorithms; the real action happens inside computers at the exchanges, and the old market is now nothing more than a stage set whose main function is to be a backdrop for news stories about the stock market. As for the prices, they move when you try to act on them, and anyway, as Lewis says, there’s the problem of the ‘dark pools’, which are in effect private stock markets, owned for the most part by big investment banks, whose entire function is to execute trades out of sight of the wider public: nobody knows who’s buying, nobody knows who’s selling, and nobody knows the prices paid. The man who did most to help Katsuyama understand this new market was an Irish telecoms engineer called Ronan Ryan. Ryan’s job involves the wiring inside stock exchanges, and he explained to Katsuyama just how crucial speed has become to the process of trading. All the exchanges now allow ‘co-location’, in which private firms install their own computer equipment alongside the exchanges’ own computers, in order to benefit from the tiny advantage this proximity gives in trading time.

As Ryan spoke, he filled huge empty spaces on Brad’s mental map of the financial markets. ‘What he said told me that we needed to care about microseconds and nanoseconds,’ said Brad. The US stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.

by John Lanchester, LRB |  Read more:
Image: Bloomberg

Mommy-Daddy Time

The reputation of parenthood has not fared well in the modern era. Social science has concluded that parents are either no happier than people without children, or decidedly unhappier. Parents themselves have grown competitively garrulous on the subject of their dissatisfactions. Confessions of child-rearing misery are by now so unremarkable that the parent who doesn’t merrily cop to the odd infanticidal urge is considered a rather suspect figure. And yet, the American journalist Jennifer Senior argues in her earnest book about modern parenthood, it would be wrong to conclude that children only spoil their parents’ fun. Most parents, she writes, reject the findings of social science as a violation of their ‘deepest intuitions’. In fact, most parents – even the dedicated whingers – will say that the benefits of raising children ultimately outweigh the hardships.

Senior’s characterisation of parenthood as a wondrous ‘paradox’ – a nightmare slog that in spite of everything delivers transcendent joy – has gone down very well in America, where parents seem reassured to find a cheerful, pro-kids message being snatched from the jaws of sleep deprivation and despondency. The book spent six weeks on the bestseller list and has earned Senior the ultimate imprimatur of a lecturing gig at the TED conference. ‘All Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate shared moments, snuggling close, provide the ultimate meaning of life.’

It is possible, of course, that some parents are lying, or at least sentimentalising the truth, when they offer up this sort of rosy ‘end-of-the-day’ verdict on parenthood. (There are strong social and emotional incentives for not publicly expressing remorse about one’s reproductive choices.) But Senior rejects this surmise as unduly bleak. Having children, she contends, has always been a ‘high cost/high reward’ activity. If today’s parents appear to be having a horrible time, it is not because they aren’t getting the rewards, but because various aspects of modern life have conspired to make them feel the costs more acutely.

By ‘today’s parents’ Senior means American, middle-class, heterosexual, married parents. These are the people she interviews and about whom she generalises throughout her book. She has deliberately excluded the poor because the problems they encounter as parents are hard to separate from their more general money problems. She has also left out the rich because they can afford to outsource the arduous or tedious parts of child-rearing. Why she has chosen to glance only fleetingly – and pityingly – at the case of single parents is less clear. Given that the marriage rate in the US is the lowest it’s been in more than a century and that in 2013 nearly half of the first-time births in the US were to unmarried women, her focus on the nuclear family seems a bit quaint.

Senior identifies three main reasons why modern parents (according to her limited definition) feel more burdened by parenthood than their forebears. One is that they tend to have greater expectations of the existential satisfaction that children – and life in general – will bring them. With their unprecedented array of ‘lifestyle options’, their tendency to regard happiness and self-actualisation as entitlements and their habit of constantly taking their own emotional temperature, contemporary adults are poorly prepared, she argues, for the self-sacrificing work that child-rearing demands. They also suffer, she believes, from a general confusion about how childcare duties should be divided. Most mothers now work, but guidelines for how they should share domestic labour with their partners have yet to be established, leaving couples with the stressful task of improvising (and fighting about) their own labour-sharing arrangements.

Lastly – and in Senior’s estimation, most significantly – modern parents have to cope with the drastically elevated status of modern children. The useful little trainee adults who, just a century ago, were toiling in fields and factories and contributing to the family purse have been transformed into family pets – ‘economically useless but emotionally priceless’ in the words of the sociologist Viviana Zelizer. (Senior doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that for some years the default phrase used by Americans to congratulate their offspring on any sort of achievement has been, ‘Good job!’ – a wishful idiom, it seems, designed to confer on a child’s economically useless exploits the illusion of the dignity of labour.) Rearing the priceless modern child is now a high performance, perfectible project, requiring an unprecedented outlay of money and time. In 1965, Senior observes, when women had yet to become a sizeable presence in the workforce, mothers spent 3.7 fewer hours per week on childcare than in 2008, even though women in 2008 were working almost three times as many paid hours. Fathers spent more than three times as many hours with their children in 2008 as in 1965.

What were these parents doing with all their extra parenting hours? Specifically, they were reading to their children, playing with them, helping them build replicas of the Giza pyramids, ferrying them to ballet class, taekwondo class, soccer practice, chess lessons, Scouts. Generally, they were attempting to maximise their children’s potential, to optimise their CVs, to ensure their psychological well-being – to make them happy.

by Zoe Heller, LRB | Read more:

Image: Ecco. All Joy and No Fun

Google Search: 15 Hidden Features

Calculator
Google's calculator function is far more powerful than most people realise. As well as doing basic maths (5+6 or 3*2) it can do logarithmic calculations, and it knows constants (like e and pi), as well as functions like Cos and Sin. Google can also translate numbers into binary code – try typing '12*3 in binary'.

Conversions
Currency conversions and unit conversions can be found by using the syntax: <amount> <unit1> in <unit2>. So for example, you could type '1 GBP in USD', '20 C in F' or '15 inches in cm' and get an instant answer.

Translations
A quick way to translate foreign words is to type 'translate <word> to <language>'. So for example, 'translate pomme to english' returns the result apple, and 'translate pomme to spanish' returns the result 'manzana'.

Check flight status
If you type in a flight number, the top result is the details of the flight and its status. So, for example, typing in BA 335 reveals that British Airways flight 335 departs Paris at 15.45 today and arrives at Heathrow Terminal 5 at 15.48 local time.

by Sophie Curtis, Telegraph |  Read more:

Images: Google

Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers

[ed. Repost- Mar. 27, 2012. Pretty amazing cover. Special credit for the kazoo solo.]

The Role of Yik Yak in a Free Society

The horror stories are all over the Internet. Anonymous-social-media app Yik Yak tore a Connecticut high school apart. (Among the anonymous “gems”: “L. M. is affiliated with Al Qaeda.” “The cheer team couldn’t get uglier.” “K. is a slut.” “Nobody is taking H. to prom because nobody has a forklift.”) A high school in San Clemente, California was placed on lockdown after an anonymous bomb threat was posted on Yik Yak. Two teenagers in Mobile, Alabama were arrested after using the app to make threats about a campus shooting. Even an article in the Boston Globe titled “The Good News About Yik Yak” emphasized how teenagers are rejecting its dark side. 


It goes without saying that threats of cyberbullying and violence are reprehensible and need to addressed quickly and effectively. But let’s not forget that anonymous speech -- and that’s what Yik Yak and similar apps like Whisper and Secret encourage -- plays an important role in a free society. The United States was founded on it. Thomas Paine, the “Father of the American Revolution,” signed his influential pamphlet Common Sense as simply “Written by an Englishman” lest his identity became known and he was hanged for treason. The authors of the Federalist Papers, the key documents used to interpret the Constitution, published under the pseudonym “Publius.” The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the right to speak anonymously, on and off the Internet, is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, a right that extends to the Internet.


And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster’s five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster’s ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That’s exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that’s why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn’t be summarily dismissed.

The targets of anonymous speech often resort to the courts to try to unmask the speaker. The plaintiff will sue a fictitious “John Doe” and immediately serve a subpoena seeking to force the Internet service provider to give up the defendant’s name. In one typical case, an anonymous poster on a Yahoo! Finance message board took part in a heated debate about the company’s managers, including the aggrieved plaintiff. The defendant posted a message saying that a male executive had made a New Year’s resolution to perform oral sex on the plaintiff though she had “fat thighs, a fake medical degree, ‘queefs’ and ha[d] poor feminine hygiene.” The plaintiff sued and served a subpoena on Yahoo! seeking the poster’s identity. The court quashed the subpoena, concluding that the statement didn’t convey libelous facts, but instead was merely crude, satirical hyperbole uttered in the course of a heated online discussion. The outcome in this case was correct, but not inevitable. (As one commentator notes, most of these John Doe lawsuits are about censorship, not money). The point is that anonymous speech can be a good thing, and often there are powerful entities out there that want to stop it.

by Robert Rotstein, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: via:

via:

via:

Programming the Moral Robot

The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research is funding an effort, by scientists at Tufts, Brown, and RPI, to develop military robots capable of moral reasoning:

The ONR-funded project will first isolate essential elements of human moral competence through theoretical and empirical research. Based on the results, the team will develop formal frameworks for modeling human-level moral reasoning that can be verified. Next, it will implement corresponding mechanisms for moral competence in a computational architecture.

That sounds straightforward. But hidden in those three short sentences are, so far as I can make out, at least eight philosophical challenges of extraordinary complexity:

• Defining “human moral competence”
• Boiling that competence down to a set of isolated “essential elements”
• Designing a program of “theoretical and empirical research” that would lead to the identification of those elements
• Developing mathematical frameworks for explaining moral reasoning
• Translating those frameworks into formal models of moral reasoning
• “Verifying” the outputs of those models as truthful
• Embedding moral reasoning into computer algorithms
• Using those algorithms to control a robot operating autonomously in the world

Barring the negotiation of a worldwide ban, which seems unlikely for all sorts of reasons, military robots that make life-or-death decisions about human beings are coming (if they’re not already here). So efforts to program morality into robots are themselves now morally necessary. It’s highly unlikely, though, that the efforts will be successful — unless, that is, we choose to cheat on the definition of success.

Selmer Bringsjord, head of the Cognitive Science Department at RPI, and Naveen Govindarajulu, post-doctoral researcher working with him, are focused on how to engineer ethics into a robot so that moral logic is intrinsic to these artificial beings. Since the scientific community has yet to establish what constitutes morality in humans the challenge for Bringsjord and his team is severe.

We’re trying to reverse-engineer something that wasn’t engineered in the first place.

by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type |  Read more:

Image: Frankenstein

Machines v. Lawyers

Law schools are in crisis, facing their most substantial decline in enrollment in decades, if not in the history of legal education. Applications have fallen over 40 percent since 2004. The legal workplace is troubled, too. Benjamin Barton, of the University of Tennessee College of Law, has shown that attorneys in “small law,” such as solo practitioners, have been hurting for a decade. Attorney job growth has been flat; partner incomes at large firms have recently recovered from the economic downturn, but the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.

Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.

The growing role of machine intelligence will create new competition in the legal profession and reduce the incomes of many lawyers. The job category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other legal services”—which includes the use of technology to help perform legal tasks—has already been surging, over 7 percent per year from 1999 to 2010. As a consequence, the law-school crisis will deepen, forcing some schools to close and others to reduce tuitions. While lawyers and law professors may mourn the loss of more lucrative professional opportunities, consumers of modest means will enjoy access to previously cost-prohibitive services.

A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects. For the last half-century, many law professors and lawyers have pressed for more government intervention in the economy. This isn’t surprising. Lawyers in the modern regulatory state reap rewards from big government because their expertise is needed to understand and comply with (or exploit) complicated and ever-changing rules. In contrast, the entrepreneurs and innovators driving our computational revolution benefit more from a stable regulatory regime and limited government. As they replace lawyers in influence, they’re likely to shape a politics more friendly to markets and less so to regulation. (...)

Discovering information, finding precedents, drafting documents and briefs, and predicting the outcomes of lawsuits—these tasks encompass the bulk of legal practice. The rise of machine intelligence will therefore disrupt and transform the legal profession.

by John O. McGinnis, City Journal |  Read more:

Image: Arnold Roth

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers