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Even top professions now face automation

When five television studios became entangled in a United States Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against the CBS network, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" - providing documents relevant to a lawsuit - the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, California, helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.