"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
You. Cannot. Win. Against. Capital.
And then you're going to sue, and realize that the system is so massively overloaded that the next available judge and jury are in 32 years. Also they're lobbying to replace those with AI judges where they entirely removed the concept of nuance.
Could see the future being AI arguments -> AI judgement -> appeal to human judge/jury
With the appeal to humans being expensive (human lawyers required?) or volume-barred in some manner.
Why would there be less demand for contract law or for privacy related law, for example? There is certainly some elasticity in law related things from my own experience.
Where have I applied elasticity blindly?
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
"Intellectual" jobs, that require thought were yet spared, as the only way to use capital for that was just to pay for more meat: see Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, etc. You could carve yourself a spot for some people because it was hard for this capital to reach them. Now that AI, a literal machine that automates thought, is here, the costs for reaching bumfuck nowhere to take the clients away from you has dropped drastically for them, but not for you. They get economies of scale, already established patterns, tools, internal databases. You're starting with hopes, dreams and a $20 Claude sub that runs out at 10AM.
There is not infinite need for lawyers, there being more lawyers does not create more legal opportunities and cases past a certain point, and you're then dependent on other things like there being enough judges.
Robots transformed capital into manual actions and killed most manufacturing jobs save for precious few experts or things that are too expensive to automate still. AI will transform that capital into intellectual labor and crush you, take all opportunities away from you.