Dear Urban Diplomat: My client’s AI assistant is driving me crazy
It’s maddening enough that he’s too busy to talk to his own lawyer, but his robot secretary is constantly making mistakes. How should I tell him that his revolutionary technological innovation is a broken telephone?
Dear Urban Diplomat, I’m a family lawyer, and one of my clients has an AI agent—a virtual helper to complete rote tasks. I find it outrageous that this guy is too much of a big shot to discuss his own divorce in person, and it’s degrading to give vital legal advice to an unfeeling robot, especially one this incompetent. The thing is supposed to summarize meetings for him, but I can tell from his email responses that it’s giving him wrong information. Any advice for how to navigate the situation without coming across as a curmudgeonly Luddite? —Tech-No, Rosedale–Moore Park
You could try an argument about the perils of entrusting life decisions to novel tech, but it sounds like he’s too far gone. Instead, focus on every single mistake this automaton makes. You just want your client to have good data. Eventually, he’ll realize that troubleshooting a janky piece of software takes more effort than showing up.
