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Is AI bad for lawyers, but great for the law?
On June 5, 1906, perhaps America’s then-most famous musician, John Philip Sousa, climbed the steps of the Library of Congress to attack “mechanical music.” The occasion was a hearing about copyright law, but Sousa’s attack was on the technology, not just the law. As he told the House Committee on Patents,
When I was a boy . . . in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
We still have our vocal cords, but in a deep sense, Sousa was right. There are no meaningful estimates of the percentage of Americans who played the piano or other instruments in the 19th century, and we don’t know exactly how many gathered in front of houses in the summer evenings. Yet it is certainly true that across the 19th century, most of the music Americans consumed was music performed by amateurs, which meant across the century, there were many amateurs creating music.
Yet however right Sousa was, and however compelling his argument would have been in 1906, it is hard to imagine rallying Americans today to give up their technical devices for…
