Immortality – The Longevity Mania and the Coming of the Lawyer Bots

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.“

 —Woody Allen

I like practicing law for 43 years and am pleased by the choices I made as a young man. I find that being a two-hatter – both a government contract and wage & hour lawyer – has brought me a variety of interesting work over the years. There is some truth to the canard that practicing law isn’t just a profession but is a “calling” of sorts. You become wise and knowledgeable, at least if you work at. If I could do this forever, I just might do so. And in that respect, I am a lucky man to have liked what I had to do to earn a living. And so, I have soldiered onward after most of my contemporaries have retired and faded from the scene. As they say in the Dos Equis commercial about the World’s Most Interesting Man, “stay thirsty my friend.”

Which brings me to the subject of longevity. I don’t need to live a long life. I just want to live a good life and remain active to the end. I have read a few books of the so-called “longevity” press. And I tried to absorb what I think is sensible about the advice they give and ignore the extreme, stupid stuff. You know the routine – moderate exercise and activity, lose weight, eat well (favor berries for your carbs, get fiber and protein from beans, eat more protein and less carbs, and drink coffee and green tea everyday), recognize that perhaps there are some pharmaceuticals and vitamins/supplements that seem to be linked to longer life expectancy, and connect often with your friends and family.  Don’t follow any prophets. Just figure out what works for you.

 I never saw the movie, but years ago I read the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story entitled The Strange Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages in reverse. He is born old and dies a baby. I am aiming to be Mr. Button, aging in reverse, and trying to stay young until it is time for “Depends.”

But I also want to be clear-eyed. There are limits. And the clock is running. Last week I got a call from a client I hadn’t heard from in some time. She just wanted to run a few things by me and get my best professional judgment. That is somewhat typical of a day in my life. Before she called me, however, atypically she had run her questions through an AI program, probably the new Anthropic Claude legal bot. (which by the way only runs on Mac). She posed a series of wage & hour related questions for me and then told me what the AI bot told her to do. Basically, I listened and then agreed with the bot. I ended up telling her she had a good grasp of the issues and the course of action to take. I really didn’t add much of value. The bot cost $20 a month or something similar.

That phone call gave me a renewed whiff of my own obsolescence. For the moment, no corporate lawyer can simply follow the advice of the bot without some due diligence. But soon enough, the corporate bean counters are going to tell their legal departments (or what is left of them) to trust the bot, and they won’t need other experts. Where did the bot get its expertise? Well, last year some crawler pored over my 200+ wage and hour blogs at www.awrcounsel.com and devoured them into some large language model/library of knowledge. I am the instrument of my own destruction! As the saying goes, most of us contain the seeds of our own destruction. Based on that interaction, my guess is that I probably won’t be in this game forever, nor will I have a human successor.