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Comment by ap22213 | Hacker News Reader

15 years is a crazy long time. Technological / scientific progress is exponential - we will witness much, much more change in the next 15 than we have in the last 15. And, that's a daunting thought, since 2000 was such a different world than it is now.

The only forces keeping law in its relative stasis are its attachments to slow-moving government processes, its 'guild-like culture' and the resulting protectionism. But, once capital moves faster in that direction (and it will) those systematic factors will slide apart quite easily.

It's good to be confident, but having participated in and thus seen the wave of progress in AI over the last 20 years, I'm pretty scared for my own career. It is definitively an exponential process and one that probably rivals Moore's law in effectiveness.

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Most technology hasn't improved very much in 15 years. Technology developed in the 1980's and 1990's has found many new applications, because of the Internet, but fundamental systems haven't improved much. In the professions, the increases in efficiency from 1995 to 2000 were more significant than from 2000 to 2015. Even Moore's law has slowed dramatically in the last 15 years.

And the government and guild protections are fictions. I work at a small boutique that would love to be able to take bigger cases away from big white shoe firms by leveraging technology. We're not going to leave money on the table right now because of some abstract loyalty to the "guild." If the technology existed, we would use it. So would everyone else. The legal industry is extremely competitive. There are hundreds of large business law firms in the country. Way too many to keep up some artificial convention not go adopt new technology that works.

I don't think the government and guild protections are fictions. This article seems to be relevant:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/21/lawyer-disrupt-thyself/

I don't think they're fictions insofar as lawyers (and laws) command a unique place in our society that other industry inputs don't. Insofar as lawyers have the ability and the incentive to prevent sweeping changes to their industry, the guild mentality seems very real to me.

I take your point though: smaller firms are very willing to make technology changes to find themselves new competitive advantages. Here's hoping smaller firms like yours (and mine) keep nipping away at those monstrous firms =D. FWIW, I have not had positive experiences when dealing with them...

The article is about non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Loosening the rules on conflicts and non-lawyer ownership of law firms would enable what happened in the accounting industry: consolidation of the industry into a handful of mega-firms. I don't see how that would be conducive to innovation. Exactly the opposite is true. A legal "Big Four" would be far more able to resist technological changes than the hundreds of firms competing with each other today.

I'm trying to think of a concrete example of protectionism keeping out new technology, and frankly I'm at a loss. I don't think it squares with the economics. Clients these days come with a budget in mind. If a law firm can do the work with say half as many billable hours by using technology, they can bid to do the work for a fixed fee 25% below the market rate, and then pocket the difference. It'd be a no brainer, if that technology existed. Instead, more often you see firms agreeing to a budget cap and just eating hours billed over the cap.

No. Think back 15 years. Almost everything in technology was the same as today. Yes memory density is higher now, cpu power efficiency is better and display technology is somewhat improved but basically we're using the same technology now as then.

In my lifetime I'd need to go back to before 1974 or so for things to be really different. That's before microprocessors became commonly used. Before pong. Not before Unix though. 40 years. Still not that different from today.

Maybe it depends where you are? East coast U.S. is entirely different culturally, behaviorally, commercially than it was 15 years ago. And, all that change has been enabled and propelled by a recursive process of capital and technology. Technology was barely a concept in most people's minds in 1999. Now, it is the prevailing culture.

I can't think of an industry that hasn't been touched since then, and most have been utterly transformed.

Technically not much changed but the way we work and live is totally different because of the advances in tech. In 2000 internet was not everywhere; I was on holiday in LA in 2004 and the internet quality in hotels that advertised with internet was miserable and mostly unusable. Mobile devices sucked and we were still in the AI winter. Search engines in 2000 did deliver total drivel for programming related questions (and probably others).

Now my subscription allows me to use my 4g in most of the EU and the US, it works very well, wifi is everywhere so basically you do not have to remember any facts. Google AI recognises pictures and auto makes panoramas and videos from pictures. When I search anything programming the first hit is the answer. Children have smartphones and tablets and use them all the time. So do my parents and my 80+ old neighbours. There are millions of coders online instead of the tiny amount in 2000; starting a software services company in 2000 was a breeze (I did) to grow and get fortune 1000 clients as there simply was very little and most was crap; try that now. Startups are everywhere and a huge % of students see that as an option now. We can 3d print implants. Did you check games lately? I can go on and on.

Although tech only got faster and bigger the world is completely different. And that is because those 'marginal' enhancements in tech and science.

I'm thinking this must be an age thing. 15 years ago isn't a significant portion of my lifetime, so perhaps I see the progress in that time period as not being tremendous. Perhaps you're younger. I've been active in this business/space/industry since around 1975 and for me not a whole lot has changed. Sure today you can put a thing with the power of a VAX on your wrist, but we expected that to happen back in 1980. I moved into the house I live in now 15 years ago and immediately set out to build myself an internet connection. I used 802.11b products that are not too different to what we use today. The one thing that has changed in the past 15 years that I see clearly is there is much more data available on the Internet, but that's just a simple adoption curve effect. Back in 1992 we had the Microsoft Developer Network on CD with a search application that ran on Windows. It was basically the same thing as Stack Overflow, except of course much slower to update and featuring contributions from vastly fewer people. But essentially the same thing. I even remember having discussions in 1992 with colleagues about how the MSDN would surely evolve to be Internet-based rather than delivered by mail on a CD.

15 years ago I didn't think I'd see self-driving cars in my lifetime, and there didn't appear to be any prospect for computer vision to get anywhere near human levels of performance.

And these thing are still true.

We have self driving cars on the streets, and vision systems out performing humans at classifying objects.

No we don't. Where can I buy a self-driving car? The vision systems are performing on a statistical basis that is admittedly impressive, but they are not "outperforming humans at vision" in any way that I understand.

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