Some lawyers, sure, but not the vast majority of the legal profession.
All those points you made are correct (besides maybe the x-risk one—you were right that that one came a little more from opinion, having worked with a bunch of lawyers I believe they generally do nothing better than provide expert arguments and rationalizations for whatever they want to believe or make you believe, rather than following the facts to the truth in good faith), but I don’t think they’re enough to outweigh the fact that the legal profession is absolutely ripe for the kinds of automation that AI excels at.
Paralegals and legal secretaries in particular I think are on the chopping block. Millions of people in those roles spend their whole day working on searching through complicated datasets of badly organized data (in discovery proceedings, each side has an obligation to present certain sets of evidence and documentation to the other side before a trial, but they have no obligation to organize it well...), picking out the relevant information to help answer a certain question or make a certain point, and arranging it to be presented in a compelling way. That’s all stuff that AI excels at and can do in the blink of an eye, and there are ways to use AI to automate some of the process without hallucinations being a problem. Google NotebookLM in particular is basically tailor-made to help lawyers parse huge troves of discovery data for the specific information they’re looking for, which many people in the legal profession have a full time job doing today. (and it takes only a little training and common sense to be able to do this and steer clear of the hallucination issue.)
Sure, I believe that lawyers will see to it that there will always be human lawyers representing clients in the courtroom, formally filing motions and submitting paperwork and consulting with clients and all the stuff that only lawyers are doing already, but in the near future I expect the giant infrastructure of clerks, secretaries and paralegals that supports them with menial paperwork to be gutted. I think the only reason it’s not happening already in a more significant way is that lawyers on average tend to be older than most other careers, and many of them are set in their ways with the technology that they’re used to. I believe the generation of lawyers that has grown up understanding computers and AI will not need nearly the number of supporting staff per lawyer as the industry currently has—if any at all.
It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results. You’re trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you’re trying to “cure” your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.
Any rational person who is above average intelligence can’t escape having some elitism. The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding and discussing certain intellectual subjects the way most rationalists do. They might just not be intelligent enough, but beyond raw intelligence, there’s also a certain confluence of personality traits that a person needs to be motivated to put in the effort to understand and participate in discourse on complex topics which most people seem to lack.
So, you have to make a choice. Your rationality and your experience have led you to a feeling of elitism, which is pretty grounded in objective facts, the fact that you have some positive traits that a majority of average people don’t. Now, is your ability to respect and enjoy spending time with people completely conditional on their ability to participate in rational discussions as your intellectual peer? That way lies misanthropy. You’ll be constantly disappointed in people for not measuring up to your standards, and your inner teenage edgelord is basically proven right. You can try to surround yourself with only smart people and rationalists and spend your life sneering at the rest of the world, if you like. You might even be happier that way, I’m not in a position to know.
But there’s another balance that seems to me to be a little healthier. You can simultaneously respect and enjoy the company of average people, while understanding that trying to talk to most of them about philosophy would be a waste of time—even plenty of them that think they understand it. Want to get in touch with the common man? Do it at a bar or a music concert or some event for a hobby you like, try not to be condescending to them and engage with them on their level. Want to participate in the Great Conversation? Do it in venues with a lot of vetting and gatekeeping to weed out the morons. Those are two entirely separate things, and trying to do them together is a huge mistake. This may be replacing misanthropy with a kind of paternalism, but that seems better to me somehow and might even be largely justified. A lot of those philosophers you cited earlier were probably grumpy introverts in personality anyway (Schopenhauer definitely was), and just the fact that you see your own misanthropy as a problem and you want to fix it sets you apart from them.