I was recently in Manhattan on business and took the opportunity to have dinner with our dear friends Allison Tolman and her beau Peter Cohen. In the course of our conversation, I was explaining what an IT industry analyst does for a living by referring to the now-famous (at least in the worlds of analysts and consultants) UPS commercial about the two consultants that first aired, I believe, during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

As I described the ad, Peter’s smile kept getting bigger and bigger. I paused and said, "What’s so funny?" Peter replied, "That’s my ad." My jaw dropped to the floor. I’ve know Peter for years and I never knew he’d been involved with one of my all-time favorite ads. Mostly, we would talk about his creative work for Sun Microsystems, but that’s a topic for another post…؟

Check out Peter’s other work as well.

This mention of "expert systems" replacing attorneys brought back fond memories of my youth. One of the events that led me to switch from being a software developer in the field of AI to becoming an attorney (I entered NYU Law School in the Fall of 1988) was my attending the First International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL) way back in May 1987 — over twenty years ago. I figured that if the attorney thing did not work out, I could always take what I learned in law school and use it to write a legal expert system to replace attorneys. Ah the naivety of youth…

It’s interesting to note that one of the presentations in 1987 was by Richard Susskind, who Mark credits with the idea that expert systems are coming into the market. The name of Susskind’s 1987 presentation? It’s "Expert Systems in Law: Out of the Research Laboratory and into the Marketplace." Well, I guess it’s been a very slow entry into the market. Here we are almost 22 years later and I don’t think expert systems have even begun to make a dent.

And I’m not sure they ever will. Or let me put it another way, by the time expert systems make rank and file attorneys worried about their livelihood to a significant degree, most other white collar workers will have long been automated out of existence — including IT Industry Analysts. Most white collar work is far more susceptible to automation than legal work. Legal concepts are some of the most abstract and logically difficult to formalize.

How in the world is an expert system going to formalize concepts like mens rea, consideration, or fair use? To this day Westlaw uses masses of bar-certified attorneys to read every court decision and to semantically annotate the text paragraph by paragraph with Key Numbers. Westlaw has done extensive R&D to find ways to automate such annotation, but after decades of trying, the best they can do is to give the human annotators some automated assistance.

It’s interesting to note that the ICAIL conference is still going. Wow, those AI researchers never give up! But the latest conference, ICAIL 2007, has nary a mention of expert systems, which is troubling if they are poised to disrupt the legal profession any time soon. Instead, virtually all the presentations seem to be about legal ontologies. No the white collar workers in the legal field who have the most to fear from automation are paralegals — they’re the ones already doing all the routinized legal tasks, like bates numbering. Shudder…

The one thing about the practice of law that might be a casualty of this recession is hourly billing. When the presiding partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Evan Chesler (for whom I had the privilege of working as a summer associate oh so many years ago) says its "time to get rid of the billable hour", it seems almost possible that this sacred tradition might come to an end. At the very least, billable hours will end long before expert systems decimate the ranks of attorneys.

BTW, when I finally left the practice of law, I did take a crack at writing some legal software. I tried to develop a program that would automatically generate legal cites in Bluebook form. Seemed simple when I started the project, but once I got into it I realized it would take almost full blown AI to do it completely and reliably — so I gave up and became an analyst instead.

Will this change my flying behavior? I doubt it; at least for the foreseeable future.

My first two criteria (in order) are: minimizing flight duration and minimizing ticket price. I can’t imagine choosing to take a flight that takes longer or costs more just to save on carbon. Now if two flight options were identical except for footprint (say one of flights was on more modern equipment that was more fuel efficient), then maybe (but not if the bigger footprint option gave me miles in a FF program I preferred). That said, I am happy that Cliqbook is at least showing me the information.

How about you? Would you use the carbon footprint information to change your flight preference?

PS Don’t ask why I’m going to Milwaukee in the middle of winter or why I’m booking a flight just a day before I depart; both are long stories.

My twitter handle is — what else — ironick!