Artificial intelligence takes on white-collar duties

Maybe it's unfair that some people think tax lawyers have the personality of a robot, but Benjamin Alarie considers that to be a plus. A Yale-trained lawyer himself, Mr. Alarie's Toronto firm, Blue J Legal, harnesses artificial (or augmented) intelligence (AI) to help lawyers and their clients work their way through the complications of tax law. We take hundreds of cases on different legal questions and train AI on how the courts make those decisions, so users can run predictions on how the courts might decide a new case," he says. Blue J Legal is at the cutting edge of a wave of new uses for AI. Robots, which have already taken over manual labour and factory work, are finding their way quickly into white-collar and professional jobs that require judgment and thinking. "I think the nature of most white-collar jobs will drastically change in the future because of AI," says Henry Kim, associate professor of operations management and information systems at York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto. "It's not to say that all the professional jobs will go away, they'll just be different," he says. AI is not only worming its way into law, but also finance, medicine and complex areas such as the development of new pharmaceuticals. In finance, "Artificial intelligence can help people make faster, better and cheaper decisions.