SAN FRANCISCO Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?

When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, "teaching" their reasoning to the computer. The software's algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.

"We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents," said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street.

Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that "learn" from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.

The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today's U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in Britain.

"These transitions have happened before," said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. "What's different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs."

It's a transition on the heels of an information-technology revolution that's already left a profound imprint on employment across the globe. For both physical and mental labor, computers and robots replaced tasks that could be specified in step-by- step instructions jobs that involved routine responsibilities that were fully understood.

That eliminated work for typists, travel agents and a whole array of middle-class earners over a single generation.

Yet even increasingly powerful computers faced a mammoth obstacle: they could execute only what they're explicitly told. It was a nightmare for engineers trying to anticipate every command necessary to get software to operate vehicles or accurately recognize speech. That kept many jobs in the exclusive province of human labor until recently.

Oxford's Frey is convinced of the broader reach of technology now because of advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that has software "learn" how to make decisions by detecting patterns in those humans have made.

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Artificial intelligence could automate half of U.S. jobs in 20 years