Episode 35 - Remaining Human in the Age of AI (Lawyering)

Kimball Parker is one of the kindest, most thrillingly sincere people I have ever met. Aside from that, he is also the CEO of SixFifty, an AI-powered employment law compliance platform; head of operations at Paychex, a payment processor which now owns SixFifty; and head of the AI Lab at the University of Chicago Law School—students in the AI Lab, like those who participated in the LawX Legal Design Lab Parker previously headed up at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, use AI to build tools for people who cannot afford attorneys. When it comes to artificial intelligence, especially with respect to its applications in the legal field, Parker really, really knows what he’s talking about.

But Parker, an English major at the University of Utah, 2013 graduate of the same University of Chicago Law School where he now teaches, and former associate in the Silicon Valley office of the elite litigation-focused firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, is as conscious of AI’s downsides as he is sanguine about its upsides. And that’s what much of our conversation focused on: what AI can’t do, what it shouldn’t do. AI is changing the world, and in the process it’s changing us. How much of that change is good? What limits should we draw on our own usage? On that of our children?

For what it’s worth, we recorded our conversation immediately after rehearsing a song we were going to sing in church—a song Parker wrote. If there’s anyone who can speak to maximizing the benefits we derive from AI while continuing to operate at the peak of our human license, it’s Kimball Parker.

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