The tragedy of the commons, AI edition(economist.com) |
The tragedy of the commons, AI edition(economist.com) |
I'll probably yield to my temptations eventually and proceed anyways. Lord help me from all the creative but completely detached interpretations I'll land on.
Usually the concerns I've seen are around the lines of "the experts are gonna favor the powerful incumbents who they see a lot" buttttt if our system is already doing that AND costing way more anyway, barring entry entirely to many, is that so much worse? Even assuming we can't try to regulate that?
This fee should help pay for the courts and reimburse and employer for time spent defending itself.
(With the judge / magistrate able to wave the fee on compassionate grounds)
s/nuance/nuisance/A lawyer isn’t going to sign on to take liability risk unless they spend quite a lot of time analyzing the AI’s outputs for possible blunders?
So it structurally can’t cost significantly less.
"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."
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).
> 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.
But AI told them they could demand these things (even if it would be illegal for us to comply! Think KYC stuff.) and they don’t have the skill to criticise the AI or know when to stop.
For a bit of history, the term was the title of a 1968 essay [1] based in part on ideas that originated earlier. It becamse popular as a driver for privatization of government services in many Western nations based on the (flawed) idea that privatization would increase "efficiency". All it did was transfer wealth from customers with inelastic demand to newly-minted private owners.
But it never seemed to match reality. The opposite seemed to be true: private resources became over-exploited whereas shared or public resources were successfully managed and shared by communities across the world in some cases going back centuries. This culminated in Elinor Ostrom [2] winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for officially debunking the idea.
Now I understand how ordinary people still quote this debunked idea. It did become popular. But journalists, particularly those for a publication called The Economist, should know better.
[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html
"The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.The tragedy of the commons is what happens in the unsuccessful systems.
The "tragedy of the commons" is just what happens in the absence of effective rules governing the use of a resource when individuals are free to act in their own interests.
The problem is that those conditions are much harder to maintain in a highly mobile, anonymous modern society. When people can easily enter, exit, and dump costs on strangers, trust and enforcement break down — which is basically where the tragedy of the commons comes from.
Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control.
In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "natural" competition, because as we all know the Free Market always finds the most equitable and consumer-desired outcome.
I'd imagine in Europe it was more common to argue for government management.
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.