Legal.IT Conference 2018 : Technological revolution – Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age

By Jessica Vona, student, Université de Montréal
& Annie-Claude Trudeau, Lawyer, BCF Avocats d’affaires

“Society is on the leading edge of
a technology tsunami. Advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of
Things, virtual reality, robotics, nanotechnology, deep learning, mapping the
human brain, and biomedical, genetic and cyborg engineering will revolutionize
how most of us live and work”.

These
are the opening sentences of Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig’s new book “Humility is the new Smart, Rethinking Human
excellence in the Smart Machine Age”.

Being
trained lawyers, they draw on extensive multidisciplinary research to argue
that we need to completely shift our definition of what it means to excel in
the new era upon us.

Indeed,
this new age will be characterized by drastic economical and social changes
driven by technological advances, likely to fundamentally change the job market
as we know it. Some experts refer to this as the fourth industrial revolution[i]
or the Smart Machine Age and believe that it could be as disruptive and
transformative for us as the Agricultural Age was for our ancestors[ii].

In
2013, Oxford University published an alarming study predicting that 47% of
total US employment could be automated by 2033[iii].
The legal field will not be spared. New tools like Ross[iv], the artificial intelligent
program that can produce comprehensive legal research in matter of seconds, or
chatbots like Donotpay[v]
that can now help anyone fill out transactional forms for maternity leave,
landlord contract violations, parking violation and more, are just the tip of
the iceberg of the new technology’s potential to surpass lawyers in many of
their traditional tasks.

This
new reality raises the question of how professionals, and more precisely
lawyers, can thrive in the age of Smart machines. According to Hess and Ludwig,
we will need to excel at critical, creative and innovative thinking and at
genuinely engaging with others, all things that machines can’t do well, at
least yet. To achieve high levels of success at these skills, the authors
recommend engaging in four key behaviours: quieting the ego, managing the self (one’s
thinking and emotions), reflective listening and otherness (emotionally
connecting and relating to others).

The importance of Quieting Ego in order to excel

As
Hess and Ludwig perfectly explain:

“we all have limited resources,
both physical and psychological. If we expend most of our energy on being
self-focused, protecting our egos, and trying to look smarter than everyone
else in the room, then we won’t have enough energy to do the tough work of thinking
critically and innovatively and focusing on and really listening to others,
which we know is the key to better learning, thinking and relating”[vi].

According
to them, the most effective way to quiet our ego is through practicing
mindfulness as a way of being more aware and attentive to our environment. For
more on the impact of mindfulness practices on human performance, you can read Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon
Kabat-Zinn and Focus, the hidden drive of
excellence by Daniel Goleman.

Managing self and social sensitivity as a way to
better collaborate

Managing
our emotions and thinking allows us to engage in the higher-level thinking and
behaviour required in the Smart Machine Age. It also allows us to be more
socially sensitive, which involves perceiving social cues and contexts in
conversation, reading other people’s emotions and being empathetic. These
skills have been found to be key to effective collaboration, which will be
crucial in the smart machine age as we will depend more than ever on collective
intelligence for innovation and problem solving. For lawyers, it also means
being receptive to the client’s emotions and thoughts and understanding how to wisely
respond to them, something that machines cannot do well.

Hess
and Ludwig shed light on two other important skills – reflective listening and
otherness – which are deeply intertwined with managing one’s self; according to
them, the combination of these skills enable the best kind of human
collaboration.

Smart organisation

The
book’s last chapter is dedicated to organisations and how they will thrive in
the Smart Age Machine. Hess and Ludwig believe that “leaders and managers will
be needed to create the right conditions that enable the highest levels of
human performance and orchestrate the connectivity and integration of
technology and humans in order to create value in constantly evolving
environments”[vii].
This means that an organisation’s competitive advantage could likely depend on
how well its employee overcome their natural proclivities to be
confirmation-biased, and emotionally defensive thinkers.

Further readings

As
technology evolves, it will become increasingly important to come up with new ways
of staying relevant as humans. Accumulating knowledge will not be good enough
anymore. Professionals and lawyers will need to focus on quieting their ego,
managing the self, listening reflectively and successfully engaging with others
in order to collaborate and think critically and creatively. These are the
skills that will underline human excellence in the Smart Machine Age. 

If
you are interested in the subject you might want to read the following books:

Amy
C. Edmonton, Teaming: How Organizations
Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass 2014)

Martin
Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and
the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic, 2015)

Tony
Wagner, Most likely to Succeed: Preparing
Our Kids for the Innovation Era (New York: Scribner, 2015)

Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The
Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant
Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014) 

La Conférence Legal.IT 
Si vous désirez en savoir
plus, de nombreux événements sont offerts à Montréal et ailleurs. Notamment, le Comité Technologies de l’information (CTI) du
Jeune Barreau de Montréal a le plaisir de vous convier à la 12e édition de
la Conférence Legal.IT, un évènement qui se déroulera le 23 mars 2018 au Centre
des Sciences de Montréal. La conférence est un incontournable pour les
professionnels œuvrant dans les technologies. En plus des conférences, Legal.IT
est aussi l’occasion pour les professionnels, créateurs numériques et investisseurs
engagés dans l’innovation de se rencontrer et de discuter. Les conférences
seront également suivies d’un cocktail.

Pour vous inscrire, cliquez ici.

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[i]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
[ii] Hess, Edward and Katherine
Ludwig. Humility is the
new Smart, Rethinking Human excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, 2017, p. 1
[iii]
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
[iv] https://rossintelligence.com
[v] http://www.donotpay.com
[vi] Hess,
Edward and Katherine Ludwig. Humility
is the new Smart, Rethinking Human excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, 2017, p. 78
[vii] Hess,
Edward and Katherine Ludwig. Humility
is the new Smart, Rethinking Human excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, 2017, p. 155