In an interesting aside to the latest posts about murderous chatbots, personality tests have recently revealed that the ‘personality’ of these virtual bots can be reliably tested using human personality tests. And that they have very human personality traits, both good and bad, that can be precisely shaped – raising implications for AI safety and
Innovation
Introducing the Half Million Dollar Job
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OpenAI has decided that the most valuable hire they make in the new year is “Head of Preparedness,” an interesting if oblique title. What king of job would that be?
The job description describes the leader of a team responsible for “tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm” and…
Getting Stupid with AI?
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A recent study supports the notion that using AI for drafting–something lawyers are eager to do–can effectively make you stupid over time. “Over four months, LLM [large language model] users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” including having difficulty recalling their own work, compared to “brain-only” users and those using search engines. These…
COLPM 2022 Conference
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The College of Law Practice Management inducted its 2022 Fellows at its annual conference on October 6-7 at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, MA, which was held for the first time in person since 2019.
The College is an international professional, educational, and honorary association dedicated to “the improvement of law practice management and…
Mental Health and Technology in the Law
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An interesting confluence is happening in the area of mental health. Technology is offering ways to recognize mental health issues that could benefit from remediation and also paths along which help can be delivered. And lawyers are in need of just such assistance.
Our last post was about CIMON, the first autonomous free-floating astronaut-assistant robot…
Recap of the COLPM Conference
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The College of Law Practice Management inducted its new Fellows at its annual conference held last weekend–October 24-25–in Nashville, TN. Ronda Muir, founder of Law Practice Management LLC and author of Beyond Smart: Lawyering with Emotional Intelligence, was one of those honored. The highlight of the conference was hearing from a couple dozen highly…
Important Steps Toward Developing Lawyers’ Emotional Intelligence
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There’s a reason that SAP, Google, Aetna and IBM all have Chief Mindfulness Officers–they are explicitly trying to address the emotional fallout among their ranks in tech-revolutionized workplaces. But those working in legal workplaces are also feeling emotional fallout, from technological pressures, isolation and other major stressors, as the Law.com Minds Over Matters project…
The Skills Crisis in Law
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Associates no longer get much of the on-the-job-training that firms once provided, usually at the client’s expense, to fill in the gaps between the theory they learned in law school and the realities of practice. And now there are more obvious gaps in the ability of young associates (and much older ones, as well) to…
Artificial Emotional Intelligence Predicts Election Results
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Research long ago revealed that the portion of the brain that lights up when politics are being discussed is the emotional area–the limbic/amygdala area of the brain–not the rational prefrontal cortex. In short, politics is not a topic about which we are rational–a conclusion that these days may be particularly apparent.
Continue Reading Artificial Emotional Intelligence Predicts Election Results
Exhaustion: Building a Successful, Sustainable Legal Organization
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Paul Rawlinson, Baker McKenzie’s Global Chair, stepped down temporarily from his position last month. The firm’s announcement read in part:
“Based on the advice of his doctor, in response to medical issues caused by exhaustion, Paul has decided to take a step back from Firm leadership and client responsibilities to make his health and recovery…