How AI is breaking the British state(economist.com) |
How AI is breaking the British state(economist.com) |
Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?
> Rather than just handling locals’ objections, a new Ai-driven planning system could decide for itself whether a housing development meets a zoning code. Rather than processing benefits claims, it could devise personalised welfare interventions.
And this sounds like it's going to work just grrrreat.
Yes, both of these pieces of legislation are extremely badly designed feel-good nonsense, which I personally hope will be shown to be so by an avalanche of claims automated by AI.
The employment rights legislation we have at the moment literally abolishes the market for labour - the final decision as to if your salary is "fair" is made by a judge.
Can you explain this? I can't find anything on this from a quick google. Employment rights act seems to say very little about salary beyond the minimum wage.
The reality is that curtailment of abusive zero hours contracts provided by the employment rights legislation was direly needed and renters desperately needed protection against landlords who would habitually jack up rents and kick you out.
These are probably the only two good bits of legislation done in the last few years.
The renters rights act has led to buy to let landlords selling up all over leading to a decline in property prices. It's hardly feel good - it means first time buyers can get on the property ladder easier and renters cant be kicked out as easily.
When the cost of such claims goes to zero, that assumed dynamic will no longer work.
I don't know about the Economist nor about the UK, but in the USA most programs that could benefit the poor are specifically designed to have very onerous processes to qualify and requalify with the intention of discouraging people from applying and to reduce success rate in obtaining the benefit they are on paper qualified to receive.
The 'undeserving poor' insanity haunts the ruling class like a decomposing vampire scarecrow.
Renters and the disabled are not the problem here.
Interesting, your observation on societal structures changing is very close to mine regarding laws: A lot of "laws" were created with the assumption that they would be applied as warranted by circumstances, and I think universal AI surveillance and perfect enforcement of laws will be a huge problem in the coming age.
The British state is being flooded with requests for things that people are actually entitled to, but enough administrative hurdles were intentionally placed in the way of to make sure that no one would get.
As usual, not really sure blaming AI is a useful way to understand the problem. British politics has felt "broken" since at least Cameron's failed bet on Brexit.
In general, our economy relies a lot on these natural filters for effort. A company with a nice website doesn't necessarily mean the company is good, except historically it kind of does, because it's a proxy for effort (and budget), both of which correlate roughly with reputability and a good product.
The same applies to well-written blog post: typically, a very good writer generally is also someone with something interesting to say, even though in theory the two things don't have to be connected.
Similarly, the entire moat of many companies is that switching to a competitor is a lot of effort.
AI is effectively sending the effort required to do any of these things to zero, which means all our existing implicit filters are going to stop working.
I would argue in a lot of cases it isn't: especially in cases where the resources are intended to go to people who are struggling in some way. People who need the most help are often the least equipped to deal with the bureaucracy, while someone who is exploiting the system can happily jump through as many hoops as it puts up (especially when they're arbitrary rules that are encouraged to be applied without critical thinking and have very little correlation with the thing that is supposed to be being assessed). It might limit the number of people using it but it selects opposite to the desired result.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
I doubt many would be happy to pay the increased taxes required to fund free all-you-can-eat provision.
From what I see multiple government departments are already pushing back from people using AI when dealing with the government. I understand the dynamics, if the cost of exercising your rights go down, more people do it and their budgets cannot cope. However, you then abuse the rights of the citizens. Regulations are designed to protect the most vocal people or the wealthy. The most vocal people can start a revolution (or get another party elected) so need to please them while the wealthy are the ones in power. I don't know how this will play out.
Do you live under a rock?
Most people agree that this rule works well in practice. Most people don't take a sick day because they don't feel 100%, even when its within their rights. If everyone decided to take Monday off because they're sick, that would be possible within the law, there's no need to provide proof you're sick. Yet, if that happened, the country would grind to a halt.
Now ask yourself, how could you implement that without eroding someone's rights and without introducing more friction?
Sometimes, you just have to assume that people are honest and won't take the piss out of the system. Or you have to introduce friction to discourage the exercise of their rights. The friction for sick leave is that you usually have to notify your employer ASAP and that you may have to fill out a return to work form.
The Economist is angry because current processes were only supposed to supply the appearance of justice, but wear down anyone who wasn't a full time employee working on someone else's behalf.
'my bad luck that the government couldn't deliver on it's promise in my case, but it must be a one off or something to do with me'
and is instead:
'the system is designed with so much friction in order to prevent government from having to deliver on it's promises/the image/laws/social contract it pretends exist (in order to keep people willing to accept the status quo)'.
Like another article today about it being ok for the government to lie to you about if your water is safe to drink, the government is straight lying here with no intention/ability to actually deliver on the agreement/social contract people are led to believe exists.
How naive.
These dimwit chatbots are more than adequate to call for justice by filing court claims, but nowhere near adequate to deliver justice by hearing them. And they never will be.
The solution is not more "AI", but less.
There's a counterparty to that transaction, and presumably has some reason to want to cancel it, so they're being harmed in some way. Even if you don't have sympathy for landlords though, there's still the second order effects where all landlords discriminate against tenants more, because they know that getting rid of bad tenants is going to be a pain. It's similar to the employment situation in Europe. Making workers harder to fire might sound like a great idea, but it also makes employers more reluctant to hire, especially if they can't easily get rid of them afterwards.
This mirrors the current increases in open source pull requests and CVEs driven by low-effort AI-aided submissions.
Obviously that's a very messed up and broken system. I'm not defending it at all.
The usual reality with these kinds of payments is that the downstream social costs of not paying them - the strain on emergency services, increased crime and vagrancy, and other negative economic multipliers - are much higher than the nominal sticker cost.
But the UK and US particularly run on the moral assumption that the weak and poor must be punished for being weak and poor, because you can't be weak and poor without also being immoral. It's an entirely reactive and emotional mindset.
This isn't exaggeration. This is exactly the attitude you see in regular editorials and articles from the far-right press.
Someone has to get the big stick, and it's either the disabled, the poor, immigrants, or small groups who don't fit in in other ways.
The judge decided that, despite prices suggesting otherwise, the two types of labour here were the same.
(Also, this is more part of the Equality Act, a piece of legislation that is in pretty dire need of redrafting for a bunch of other reasons, as opposed to the Employment Rights Act)
I think the article lacks evidence that anything has changed recently.
Some landlords believe that because it brutally eats into their profits and because it's a band aid which addresses the cost of housing without magically fixing supply shortages that it ought to be scrapped with extreme prejudice.
"Sure, it would be a tragedy if I tossed the nurse out of her apartment but has anybody considered the plight of the junior investment banker looking for a place to rent who could pay me more?"