P2P

21 I L T A N E T . O R G A rtificial intelligence technology has been increasingly applied across various industries over the past 20 years and continues to advance rapidly as a foundational technology. Every industry, from consumer goods to manufacturing as well as every professional and service industry, has benefited in some way from the application of AI. While the legal field has typically lagged behind when it comes to the adoption of new technology, AI has emerged prominently in certain areas of legal work. The most significant and impactful application of AI in the practice of law has been in the process of e-discovery – streamlining and reducing the time and cost of previewing and reviewing thousands, or even millions, of documents. Other AI applications in legal practice can be found in the analysis and generation of contracts and other documents as well as speech recognition to aid in the transcription of notes and various other dictation tasks. Whereas the application of AI in e-discovery has probably been the most impactful use of the technology, other areas of legal practice have not quite lived up to its hype. For example, while AI has been useful in reducing the time and cost of transcribing the spoken word to text, it has its shortcomings and by no means should be seen as meeting the promise of such applications as Siri and Alexa fundamentally altering the way we work. It can be argued that AI is at the peak of its hype curve. Investors are throwing resources at the field in any form and any application, and product and service providers are touting their novel and impactful uses of the technology as differentiators. As technologies reach the peak of inflated expectations, there inevitably comes something of a backlash, sometimes referred to as "the trough of disillusionment." In this period the promises of the life-altering benefits of the technology start to fade away as the reality sets in that some applications offer material, often amazing impacts on how we live and work, but many applications don't. A great recent example would be blockchain technology, which is fundamentally a record encryption methodology. When blockchain was introduced, it promised to alter how we store data and structure transactions in every aspect of our business and personal lives. Roughly a decade later, the only arguably mainstream application of blockchain is in the still burgeoning cryptocurrency industry. There is no question of the applicability of blockchain in such areas as banking, financial instrument trading and clearing, but it certainly hasn't approached the immediate life-changing significance that the early hype promised. The important thing to understand when assessing the impact of technologies in our lives and work is to take a sober assessment of where and how it will specifically " It can be argued that AI is at the peak of its hype curve."

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