The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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/It’s also on the court system to leverage procedure correctly to add safeguards against the kind of behaviour you describe.
I understand anecdotally the US system is more open to abuse of this nature, but I don’t know the details. This article though was specific to UK.
Of course it does, often. But that's a pathology, not a feature to be proud of.
It's true that some complaints are irrational, vindictive, or vexatious, but the system seems quite good at identifying those already.
If the complaint has a high probability of success then it has a low probability of making the plaintiff pay costs. If it has a low probability of success then isn't that what we're trying to deter?
When the odds of success are 50/50, in this context that's a nuisance complaint because making it "free" to turn all of those into real adjudications would flood the system with exactly the cases where the outcome is unclear which are correspondingly the hardest to efficiently resolve. The only practical way to address that is to clarify and simplify the rules to begin with so that the outcomes are predictable rather than ambiguous, and then we're back to not really deterring anyone because it's obvious who is going to win.
And in the meantime plugging up the system with unlimited questionable complaints isn't very prudent.
1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want. 10% will deter a lot despite those being cases that should happen. Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds. Their fuzzy guessing range is going to include worrying amounts of failure chance even for very strong cases.
But then won't experts be offering that insurance on easy to win cases left and right?
> 1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want.
You don't actually want to deter meritorious cases at all, but we don't have that as an option. You can either have more false negatives or more false positives. Requiring either one to be zero is going to make the other one unsustainably large.
And that's the case even if there isn't any formal penalty for filing a losing case, because there is still a time cost. This is actually the "problem" AI is creating -- the time cost still isn't zero but now it's lower and therefore less able to serve its previous role of deterring frivolous cases.
> Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds.
Having something that can tell them that is essentially required regardless or they'll be continuously initiating cases with a <1% chance of success.
No, I don't think so. Too much research for not enough profit.
> And that's the case even if there isn't any formal penalty for filing a losing case, because there is still a time cost.
Time is cheap when your wages are low, while penalties are not cheap.
> Having something that can tell them that is essentially required regardless
It's not a binary between knowing the odds accurately or not at all. Even with good advice there will still be uncertainty.
Isn't this basically how things work now when lawyers take cases on contingency?
> Time is cheap when your wages are low
Disposable time is very expensive when your wages are low. You have to work more hours just to make rent so you have less of it to begin with and then you have to spend what little you have left doing all the things you can't afford to pay someone else to do.
> It's not a binary between knowing the odds accurately or not at all. Even with good advice there will still be uncertainty.
If you know that the odds of winning are between 5% and 100% then you barely know anything and the result of proceeding with only that information would be a huge number of losing cases. If you know that they're between 90% and 100% then that's the situation where an insurer should see that and want to make money.
If there's a huge payout, sure. They're going to ignore you for a $10,000 case.
> Disposable time is very expensive when your wages are low. You have to work more hours [...]
That's only if you can get a ton of hours. A lot of people can't.
> If you know that they're between 90% and 100% then that's the situation where an insurer should see that and want to make money.
I'll just say it again: Too much research.
Insurers hate custom stuff and charge tons of money for it. If you have little money to spare, the fee just to get an insurance company to analyze your case is already too much for you to go through with it.
The entire system basically doesn't work for a $10,000 case. That's probably about the worst case scenario. For small claims you can have an abbreviated process because nobody is that worried about always getting it right when the amount in question is $400. When it's a million dollars then it's worth the time to go through the whole process. But $10,000 is enough that you can't just dismiss accuracy concerns yet not enough to do the things needed to actually address them.
For example, you can get into federal court because you have a dispute between residents of different states, but only if the amount in controversy is also at least $75,000. Less than that and the federal courts won't even look at it.
> That's only if you can get a ton of hours. A lot of people can't.
That's when they have to take a second job or moonlight driving for Uber etc.
> Insurers hate custom stuff and charge tons of money for it.
Insurers hate bespoke stuff because their business is about pooling common risks. If you want to insure your Bengal tiger against the risk of contracting a tropical disease while being transported through Brazil then they're going to quote you the "get lost" rate.
Common legal risks are often pretty predictable and they wouldn't necessarily even have to do much analysis. List the elements the claimant would have to prove in order to win and have the insured assert that they're true and specify how they intend to prove it. If they lie to the insurance company and that comes out in the proceeding then the policy is void and liars get what they paid for. If they told the truth then they have a predictably high probability of winning and that's the sort of risk insurance companies like.
For instance if you know for a fact that you have been fired due to your race (perhaps you were outright told this is the case), but have no evidence (you weren't recording and there were no witnesses), your case has merit (it really did happen), but unless you get lucky and some evidence appears in discovery your odds of success are miniscule.
I'd argue that in such a case preventing such a person from seeking justice would be wrong, since they were really victims and diserve redress.
If the system isn't actually going to give them redress then what benefit is there in consuming the resources of the complainant and the court only to end up with the same result? The problem you have to solve in those cases is how to make it so someone with a meritorious claim would have a high probability of winning.
that would encourage lawsuits against the state and big corporations, and make it less worth it to sue small businesses or your own employees. thats common sense because bigger more powerful organizations tend to be more evil (as in breaking the law because they can afford to pay fines) and money is a good measure of power in capitalism.
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.
https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investig...
https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl
LMK if you want to know more.
I saw a sequence diagram browsing around, seemed to be specific to a sample scenario?
Fair question, and the "training course" read is not an accident; it's the same shape underneath. A program is an ordered chain of modules, each with a declared actor and typed inputs/outputs. Courses are also that. So it renders with the same components. The sequence diagram you found isn't a sample scenario, it's the deal template's actual step graph; the thing an instance runs on.
Three authored files per domain:
- an ontology: the domain's vocabulary, its regulatory frameworks with real citations, the O*NET occupations that staff it, the systems of record it touches
- intents: what a person actually shows up wanting ("open a gun store, need an FFL"), with typed parameters
- deal templates, one per intent: ordered pipeline_steps, each with an actor, inputs, outputs, and a policy_check
The page you clicked is generated from the last two deterministically. No model in that path.
The part that speaks to your TLA+ instinct: I deliberately don't formalize what the law means. I formalize the procedure, and bind each step to the provision that authorizes it. Formalizing semantics is exactly where you get the creative, detached interpretations you're worried about, because every gap gets filled by the model's guess. Formalizing procedure asks the model to transcribe and cite, which is checkable:
- every step input is a ref; param:x, step:3.some_output, system:NICS.event; and it has to resolve. A step: ref must name an earlier step's declared output, so the dataflow is a DAG with referential integrity.
- every step's policy_check must name a framework declared in the ontology. A step that no provision authorizes fails validation.
So most hallucination becomes a build error instead of a plausible sentence. That's the whole trick. Not a smarter model; a narrower artifact.
Concretely, since you're right to expect slop: my first pass at four new agencies came back with 100% of step inputs referencing parameters that didn't exist, and prompts that literally said "Subject?". The validator refused all forty programs. That's the mechanism working; I'd have merged them on a read-through.
Intents and flows for ATF, if you want to see the layer under the program page: https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf
Limits, since you'll ask. It decides nothing; no adjudication, and consequential steps are human-gated. It's also not a formal method: the invariants are referential integrity and citation binding, not model checking. The genuinely temporal parts are the deadlines, and those do bite; the NLRB's six-month charge window runs from filing and service, with service being the filer's own duty, so a filing-date-only clock computes the wrong date on a deadline that destroys the claim if you miss it.
Re: the sibling comment about discretion; that's the actual pitch. Discretion hides in the gap between the written rule and the practiced procedure. Writing the practiced procedure down, with a citation per step, is what makes the gap visible.
Each "program" here is a government program, agents orchestrate everything including the collaboration between all parties required.
High points: I have been able to help over 100 people get housing with no HITL on my side.
Note: Each host/subdomain is a project, they all inherit policy from each other and that drives the program generation and orchestration layer. Policies can be managed for the diff agencies at rnc/dnc.dev
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?
Typically, the arbitrator is very well versed in the rules/area they are enforcing, and can see right through a snow job. In my province there is a tenancy tribunal that has to make a ruling before a court gets involved, and the courts rarely disagree with a decision made by the arbitrator in the 1% of cases that do get appealed. Because the rules are so clear, you can shovel piles of paperwork at them, and they will ignore it because they know what pieces of paper they actually need to make their decision.
It isn't for complex big money cases, but it means that courts have more time for those cases because they aren't dealing with ticky tacky minor disputes over damage deposits and fender benders.
Tenancy arbitration is just one of them, BTW. Just about every industry or agency has an outside ombudsperson that is the first step of dispute resolution before a court will be interested.
If anything, some of the largest civil law countries in Europe, like Germany and Italy, can arguably be considered worse than common law countries in all of these respects. Whether that's incidental or due to civil law, I cannot say.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lawyers-p...
Apparently a highly biased measurement because the German legal system has more public funding compared to the US. I asked «For an argument against litigious societies, where someone points to "lawyers per capita" to compare the US with Germany, what might be a better yardstick?»
The response was interesting to me: the key bit was "Germany has a massive civil service and specialized court system where many law degree holders work as judges or state administrators". I'm a geek from New Zealand so unfortunately that isn't something I can validate from knowledge.
The English legal system/philosophy (including jury trial and the adversarial prosecution/defense dichotomy) derives historically from English/Anglo-Saxon traditions (the 'common' law of England) and differs substantially in some respects from the legal systems in other countries which derive from Roman and later French/Napoleonic conventions (known confusingly as 'civil' law).
EDIT: although you mention civil law in your other comment - what I am getting at is the difference in role of judge/prosecutor in criminal cases between the two systems being comparable to GGP's suggestion
> 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.
"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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
For example if you are interested in bias, an AI system can be backtested; new policies applied on old data, and whatever metric for inequality you are investigating can be measured.
You can’t backtest a human.
I don’t view “the state” as a commons. It’s a separate beast. The commons is explicitly owned by all, and I think that’s a faulty model for the state.
And to your objection - you’re just objecting to the bad implementation. Obviously we should build it good, not bad - just like every policy. And just like every state action we at least know will not get the perfect version. There is no axiomatic necessity to any of the concerns you raised, and I feel they are obvious points that need to be considered in the design.
But if you have other policy ideas do share! As I said I don’t see another path, realistically speaking.
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.
There ought to be a lot more small claims court cases in the US, just to keep businesses honest.
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of...
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.
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.
The only difference now is that the general population has gained access to low cost legal help and are able to push and argue (whether rightly or wrongly), previously it was the other way around.
Ty, and to answer your question: No. I'm commenting on a neat parallel. Personally I like the improvements that come from fairer games.
Well yes, because we don't do that. You might be shocked to hear we don't even have a ToS or EULA and the relevant legislation acts as that for our purposes.
Where you might see it as a deluge of AI slop - and I've got no doubt it is - I see the need for whatever part of the govt you're into improve their services.
If the public is annoyed by how your service is being provided and they feel the need to send through AI generated privacy demands, that suggests the department you're in isn't doing a good job relative to your customer's expectations. Something needs to change; maybe have a page that allows people to delete accounts or whatever private information they're ALLOWED to delete, maybe the public needs to feel more reassured that their data is safe, or maybe it's something else.
Whatever the reason, AI has placed pressure on you and your arm of government to meet the expectations of the public, pressure that didn't previously exist.
When the 'democratised access' means they're quoting laws from other countries, sometimes multiple other countries mashed together I don't think anyone is getting value out of it.
We're not getting informed engagement from the public and the person making demands isn't getting any kind of valued legal assistance.
We have always, and continue to have, thoughtful engagement from the public in the form of questions about our operations. This new thing is not that. It's wild.
I take your point about there being an opportunity to be more proactively transparent or clear with people and I push for that a lot... but the sad fact is this new class of AI fuelled fervour really is just something else. It takes away our limited resources to do good work just to respond to it.
Perhaps it's more a democratisation? Maybe, there were many worthy tribunals before but the prospective claimants weren't able to access legal support?
I'd guess it's a bit of both.
It was very common at the time of the founding of the USA for the law to be understandable enough for a 'common' person with a couple of years of study and apprenticeship to understand the relevant jurisdictions and case law and resolve their own cases.
Now, much of law and academia relies of experts that are inaccessible to most but the wealthy.
Should we find the "common person" enabled to assert their rights, you'll find a lot of corporate misbehavior gone.
Right now, it's just easier for corporations to misbehave and stand behind an army of corporate lawyers to cover them.
Not for much longer...
https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/...
> Interim relief is a case study of how AI, like a heat-seeking missile, can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030.
>
> 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.
There are a lot of laws that exist on the corporate and individual level solely for the purpose of selective enforcement to throw "the book" at the unpopular; the insurgents; or the under-resourced. It's an implicit component of the legal system.
For example, a fossil fuel utility, Entergy, stopped an insurgent wind farm / project by arguing that the startup making HVDC lines, Clean Line Energy, couldn't make power lines, because only utilities could make power lines. And to be a utility you need to have power lines. From the paper, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads...
> Entergy pointed out that only public utilities can build transmission lines in Arkansas, and that Arkansas law defines “public utility” as a company that “own[s] or operat[es] in [Arkansas] equipment or facilities for...transmitting...power to or for the public for compensation.”152 The Arkansas law creates a catch22. Because Clean Line did not own or operate any transmission lines in Arkansas, it was not a public utility. And because it was not a public utility, it was not authorized to build transmission lines.
> In 2011, a fossil fuel utility convinced the Arkansas Public Service Commission to deny certification because the wind company had no existing transmission infrastructure, and so did not fit the legal definition of a “utility.” In 2017, the Illinois Supreme Court denied certification for the same reason. The Missouri Public Service Commission claimed that certification was not in the public interest because “harm” to landowners “outweighed any in-state benefits.” Projections for the wind project, however, suggested that it would create over 1,500 jobs and reduce electricity prices for Missourians by over $10 million annually.
> In 2016, authorities in Oklahoma prosecuted bartender Colin Grizzle for serving vodkas infused with flavors like bacon and pickles. The practice, though popular with patrons, violated Title 37, Chapter 3, Section 584 of the Oklahoma Code.
> In 2012, a Minnesota man, Mitch Faber, was jailed for the crime of not finishing the siding on his own house.
> In 2011, North Carolina authorities prosecuted Steven Pruner for selling hot dogs from his food cart outside the Duke University Medical Center without a permit. Pruner was sentenced to 45 days of police custody.
Usually, there's been an information asymmetry between ordinary people and the powers that be who know these aspects of law. It's not easy to find such loopholes unless you spend time studying statutes. The parameters are too vague and the laws are usually written in an obtuse way that non-specialists find hard to decode.
Enter LLMs.
Machines can and will reason over otherwise vague queries and retrieve these laws. And as these laws and regulations are still valid, they can then assist the individual with calling for enforcement / compliance.
The Economist assumes that most of these cases are false. I would like to argue an alternative perspective.
If these complaints were fake, then surely they would be dismissed? If the petitioners were out of line, then the companies shouldn't have cause to worry.
If you assert they're false over a "common sense" standard, then why does the regulation exist?
If the regulation itself is vague and wrong, then why have these regulations persisted in both use and letter over time?
Why are individuals and upstarts at fault for doing something the government, institutions and large corporations have been doing since the dawn of time?
Why dost thou protest, "How dare they shine a floodlight on my crime?"
Big companies have a steady stream of legal cases with questionable merit. The lawyers start the case and then try to make it look like it will be a long and difficult battle with a lot of legal work (discovery, etc) attached.
The goal is to get the company to offer a monetary settlement to make the case go away. If you can inflate the difficulty of the case such that it would incur huge amounts of legal work for the company to disprove it, they might calculate that it’s cheaper to offer the person $20,000 than to spend $40,000 of lawyer salaries for a team of people to handle it.
Some of the stories I heard from corporate legal people were crazy, like people forgetting that there were cameras in the building and trying to bring cases that were easily contradicted by reviewing the recordings.
As far as I can tell the limiting factor on these cases is people being afraid of expensive lawyer costs if they lose. If AI removes the lawyer costs from the equation and people start blasting companies with frivolous lawsuits with ChatGPT driving the case, I could see this becoming a real problem.
This is an example of a larger pattern: AI assistance breaks any human system which was designed for a world in which bureaucratic friction keeps volume manageable.
Turns out that's a whole lot of human systems.
"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 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 thing is, like most commons, the land was maybe not directly owned, but there was a management responsibility. as in it was owned by the crown but was granted for the use of the towns folk so long as Harry Big Cheese to hunt thrice a year at some obscure feast day.
the point was, management was there, and enforced. Any common that didn't have effective management would fall foul of its rights and legal action would be taken. Or riots.
Common land is owned, but there are group rights.
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.
>The problem is that those conditions are much harder to maintain in a highly mobile, anonymous modern society.
This also isn't true. You don't need identities when the heuristic is behavior, and action can be taken by either the public or by agents empowered by the public.
The tragedy of the commons is what happens in the unsuccessful systems.
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
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.