Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.
"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 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.