Comment by Gander5739
14 hours ago
From 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."
I 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).
> 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.
If you get rejected you can appeal the part the AI rejected the same as if you get rejected by a judge.
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> 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.
State capacity is a common good though, and AI makes abusing it much easier.
It's excludable, so I don't think it can be considered a common good.
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Yes.
There ought to be a lot more small claims court cases in the US, just to keep businesses honest.
Or reform your legal system? I mean it's clearly not working very well, time for a change.
So how do you propose to deal with the inevitable errors using AI would cause?
You cant fool me. It's AI all the way down.
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