Re ~10% trainee intake making partner. Also consider that around 70% of many firms’ trainee intakes are female. A high proportion move in-house or drop out of the workforce after having kids. So the odds of male trainees making partner is much higher than you quote. But you’re right that it takes longer now. That’s compensated for to an extent by the higher assoc salaries.

That’s partly true, but who those Associates are has changed.

Back when I qualified (2005) if you weren’t a partner by 7/8 PQE you were over the hill. Most of my trainee supervisors (about the same as now, 3-6 PQE at the time) were full equity by the time I was 3 years qualified. This was at an MC firm. Nowadays people are getting made up at 10-12 PQE and the number making it is ~10% of a trainee intake.

So Associate pay has gone up but the real money is getting further away and harder to get into. It would be incredibly rare now for a trainee at a firm that size to have 3 supervisors who were all equity before 10 PQE, not so back then.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow

In fairness, I think he’s always said that the very high end of law will do well. What he’s got very wrong though is BigLaw. No doubt he’ll claim that he’s early and assocs at big law firms will eventually be turned into ‘legal engineers’ or whatever.

His own son is a commercial barrister.

If it were all doom and gloom for the profession, I’m sure he would have persuaded him to look for other ways to make a living.

So far this prediction has been completely wrong, as junior lawyer wages at corporate law firms have continued to soar, alongside partner earnings. I’d like to see Susskind reminded of this. Anyone who followed his advice has lost a lot of money.