A Wharton team1 went looking for the kind of person who surrenders their judgement to AI, and found one: trusts the machine, dislikes hard thinking, scores lower on reasoning. Arguably that doesn’t read onto most patent attorneys.
Then the Wharton team added deadlines. The time pressure of deadlines pushed people to surrender their judgement to AI. That starts sounding more relevant to patent attorneys whose lives are governed by endless deadlines.
We are used to the idea of thinking fast and thinking slow, but now we have the option for thinking artificially. Put a careful reasoner under a deadline and thinking slow goes overboard. That is when we used to hand the thinking over to thinking fast. Now we surrender to our thinking machines.
What interests me is how do you keep your thinking fast muscles without thinking slow. Doctors who repeatedly deferred to AI recommendations for endoscopy analysis eroded their unaided diagnostic performance. It looks like thinking artificially deskills human judgement.
I see lots of concerns that AI is replacing the next generation of attorneys. What if it is also deskilling the current generation who surrender judgement under the innate time pressure of the profession?
Related
- IP work as craft — why Taylorism and AI fail at the same point
- LLM OR LEMON
- SLOW PLANNING & FAST FILING