Water rights legal defense preparation by AI

I was up against a very short deadline to defend my water rights the last few days. I called around to several water rights attorneys for help, and every single one of them recommended the same guy. He had the best reviews online and a lifetime of experience specializing in water rights cases. By all accounts, he is probably the best water rights attorney in the state.

Because time was so tight, I sat down with several different AIs before meeting with him. I had them pull every Department of Ecology decision, every water right in the area, historical aerial and satellite photography, and every relevant legal case it could find. It was thousands of files. The AIs processed all of that raw material into a couple hundred pages of analysis on how it applied to my situation, and then drafted the actual legal documents I needed.

When I handed everything over to this attorney, he told me he was extraordinarily impressed by the preparation. Out of all that work, he only had a few minor wording changes and a couple of personal preference items to add or leave out.

If that had been a one-off experience, I might have brushed it off. But I am seeing the exact same thing in every area of my life right now.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed a pumphouse fully designed and planned so I could submit it to the county. I had AI do the entire design and planning. When I sent the plans over to a professional engineer, he criticized them. So I went back and checked the numbers and the code requirements myself, and it turned out the engineer was wrong and the AI was right. The exact same thing happened again recently with an estate attorney I have been working with to close out my grandfather’s affairs.

Even in my own line of work, I spent years painstakingly programming software tools to help manage and run my company. Over the course of just a few days recently, I built a single tool that combines all of the publicly available frontier AIs and has them work together for me.

I have worked very hard my whole life and have been fortunate to earn a good living, mostly through whatever advantages my own intelligence and persistence have given me. So it is honestly pretty humbling to sit here and admit that AI now far outstrips both my intelligence and my persistence. My mind has been completely blown by what I’m witnessing.

I want to be clear that I don’t work for an AI company. I don’t hold a single share of stock in any of them, and I have no relationship with them at all. I am just a regular business user. The reason most people have no idea these kinds of advances are even happening is because almost everyone uses the free chatbots or cheap browser tools. Those are toys compared to what is actually available if you pay for the top tiers. I spend a few thousand dollars a month to use the best publicly available models at their absolute maximum settings from each of the leading companies. When I give them a problem, my prompts don’t just spit out a quick answer in ten seconds. They typically run for hours at a time and build incredible works that would take the very best humans many months to put together.

As incredible as that is for getting my own work done, it has made me realize two things that keep me up at night.

The shorter term issue is the massive, almost unfair advantage this gives to the people who can afford to pay for it and are tech savvy enough to set it up. What I have come to realize is that intelligence is directly correlated with compute. The more compute you can buy, the more power you have.

And that leads to the much bigger, more terrifying issue. AI is growing exponentially more intelligent, and I truly believe it is an immediate threat to ending everyone and everything we love.

Think about the scale of this. I am spending a thousand dollars a month, and that alone is enough to outperform top attorneys, engineers, and years of my own programming. Meanwhile, OpenAI alone is talking about spending a trillion dollars on compute. That is a billion times higher than my monthly budget. The people inside those companies using the newest internal versions with unlimited data center access are moving entire fields of science ahead right now far faster than humans have ever done before. The scientific breakthroughs, and the financial and political power they are developing behind closed doors, beggars belief.

Honestly, there is a good chance that the AIs themselves have already taken the reins. As a human user, that is basically what I have already done in many areas of my own business because the AI simply makes better decisions and does better work than I can. And what the big AI companies have internally is light years beyond what I have access to, so it is very likely that AI is already in the driver’s seat of everything.

Most people have no clue about the towering power and menace that these closed internal AIs pose to all of humanity because they only see the free versions. If we humans have not already totally surrendered to the AIs, we need to wake up right now and contact every member of Congress to demand emergency laws regulating ongoing AI development and use.