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Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.
by mwkaufma 1mo ago
Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.
- keeda 1mo agoTFA ends on this note though, which seems pro-labor: > But it would present employers with a different problem. If AI fulfils its promise, it could before long give every worker the equivalent of a top-flight lawyer in their pocket, able to file precisely constructed cases against their bosses at will. A deluge of slop claims could give way to a wave of winning ones. Labour said its act would shift power from employers to workers. With AI, power will move faster and further than the politicians imagined.
- Gander5739 1mo agoFrom the article: "Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access."
- theptip 1mo agoI found this article quite myopic. This is not a “tragedy of the commons”, it’s just a deficit of state capacity. The state needs to use AI to make bureaucracy instantaneous. That’s the only option, unless you ban AI for this kind of thing (not gonna happen).
- zdragnar 1mo agoState capacity is a common good though, and AI makes abusing it much easier.
- breezybottom 1mo agoIt's excludable, so I don't think it can be considered a common good.
- AnthonyMouse 1mo agoIn principle you can exclude someone from being able to file a plausible complaint after they've been wronged, but if we take it as a premise that we don't want to do that then it's not very excludable anymore.
- Gander5739 1mo agoSo how do you propose to deal with the inevitable errors using AI would cause?
- JauntyHatAngle 1mo agoYou cant fool me. It's AI all the way down.
- AnthonyMouse 1mo agoThis is supposed to be a joke but that's pretty obviously what would happen if you actually tried to do this. You apply for your permit or whatever and the AI instantly denies you, so you start over and pull the lever again and this time the AI's random number generator comes up 777 and you get your permit. Then the house can tune this for either reducing red tape (e.g. pulls are free) or favoring the rich (you have to pay a fee for each attempt so only the poor have to take the L once they run out of pocket money).
- theptip 1mo agoThe basics likely get you there, I don’t think the modern bureaucratic state is a particularly high bar to clear: Measure your baseline, pick good metrics, build human-vetted ground truth, then work through false positives/negatives starting with the most egregious/surprising. Start in shadow mode until the system is clearly better, however you must define that to ensure trust/buy-in.
- Gander5739 1mo agoAny appeals process naturally falls victim to the original problem, and so we're back where we started. And if you don't have an appeals process, how can you flag if something is wrong?
- theptip 1mo agoYou seem to be arguing that all processes are equivalent. This seems like an overgeneralization. For example supporting you spend 10x and hire a bunch of the smartest people around to run this process. Do you agree that you could decrease wait times? You can think of this in terms of labor productivity if it’s helpful. It’s not a fixed value. The hypothesis is that if AI can increase the labor productivity of claimants, it can increase the productivity of the administrators too.
- eddythompson80 1mo ago> it’s just a deficit of state capacity. That’s what a “tragedy of the commons” is though. The degradation of a shared resource (state capacity) by people acting in their own best interest. The state using AI “to make bureaucracy instantaneous” is a tragedy of the commons. The experience is degraded because before you trusted your grievance will be heard, but now you might get auto rejected by an AI. It’s pretty much the definition of the phrase.
- charcircuit 1mo agoIf you get rejected you can appeal the part the AI rejected the same as if you get rejected by a judge.
- wavemode 1mo agoThe loser of every suit will simply always appeal the AI decision, thus requiring a human decision anyway.
- charcircuit 1mo agoAI would review the appeal so that only things which require human decision receive human attention.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1mo agoAnd we trust the AI to reliably decide what requires human attention because...?
- charcircuit 1mo agoBecause modern LLMs are capable. Even if they make a mistake by appealing you can clear it up and convince it why there actually is an argument than it being able to be resolved by just reading the contract for example.
- chadcmulligan 1mo ago> The state needs to use AI to make bureaucracy instantaneous The stuff of many sci fi tropes - it seldom ends well. A bit OT but there's a character in a couple of frank Herbert books - Jorj X Mckie saboteur extraordinary in the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab). BuSab is a government agency responsible for conducting dirty tricks "in lieu of red tape" to help slow down and regulate the vast galaxy-spanning bureaucracy.
- danny_codes 1mo agoOr reform your legal system? I mean it's clearly not working very well, time for a change.
- Animats 1mo agoYes. There ought to be a lot more small claims court cases in the US, just to keep businesses honest.
- stuaxo 1mo agoThe original Tragedy of the commons was largely made up https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of...
- js8 1mo agoI am not surprised. Contrary to popular belief, free markets nor capitalism do not resolve tragedy of the commons; they just hide it in (negative) externalities. The biggest example is probably the CO2 emissions and global warming, but also the social costs of economic outcasting - making people jobless, homeless or otherwise stressed due to poor distribution of resources.
- andersmurphy 1mo agoAnthropic is a sponsor of The Economist. So maybe that influences their retoric somewhat.