Artificial Intelligence Becomes New Competitor for Law and Medical Graduates, Says Former Google Executive
Law school and medical school graduates now compete not only with their human counterparts but also with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The emergence of AI in this competitive landscape warrants serious concern, as it threatens to displace work traditionally performed by lawyers and doctors.
Jad Tarifi, a former senior executive at Google and founder of the technology giant’s first generative AI team, contends that spending years in law school or medical school no longer guarantees a secure career future. This threat to advanced degrees stems from educational methodologies that remain heavily dependent on memorisation and pattern recognition.
According to Tarifi, the foundational work of junior lawyers and junior doctors typically involves routine tasks. These include sorting through stacks of legal documents, researching case precedents, or diagnosing basic clinical symptoms based on medical textbooks. Capabilities such as memorisation and information retrieval are now being rapidly supplanted by large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which perform these functions with remarkable speed and accuracy.
Moreover, the latest generation of AI models has demonstrated the ability to pass legal certification examinations and medical licensing tests in the United States with scores exceeding average human performance.
Tarifi emphasises that the velocity of AI evolution stands in stark contrast to the sluggish pace of academic curricula. “AI itself will undergo fundamental changes by the time you finish your studies,” he stated, as reported by Fortune. This means that rather than graduating as an expert in cutting-edge knowledge, students risk finding that the theoretical knowledge they studied for years is now automated by software by the time they receive their degrees.
Furthermore, Tarifi highlights the shifting financial motivations of younger generations. Previously, an advanced degree guaranteed employment with six-figure salaries. However, because the value of merely “possessing information” has approached zero due to AI, such financial assurances are gradually disappearing.
He recommends that individuals pursue medical degrees, law degrees, or doctorates only if they genuinely possess an obsessive passion and deep commitment to pure research in their field, rather than seeking them primarily for financial security.
If advanced degrees no longer guarantee safe careers from automation, what should younger generations do? It is increasingly likely that the success of doctors and lawyers in the future will be measured not by how many legal provisions or diseases they can memorise, but rather by their level of empathy, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and ability to build human connections—skills that no AI system has yet been able to replicate.