How AI is breaking the British state | Hacker News Reader

How AI is breaking the British state

economist.com

34 pointstchalla64 comments

> One step is to stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims. Britain’s Employment Rights Act and Renters’ Rights Act open avenues of legal challenge for workers and tenants. Not only are they misguided, but ministers put little thought into how they would burden the courts.

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.

> 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?

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.

>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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0817jd9dqo

The judge decided that, despite prices suggesting otherwise, the two types of labour here were the same.

Ah, I see, an argument that there was gender discrimination in pay for 'equal value' jobs despite the actual job being different. I agree this decision seems like a bit of a strange reach, but it's far from saying it abolishes the market for labor entirely.

(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)

That has nothing to with the recent legislation referred to in the article. The principle (which I disagree with BTW) has been part of equality law for decades.

Why are these cases only happening now? The article is clearly talking about the wider principle anywwy

The cases have been happening for decades. I recall studying one in the early 90s so it probably happened in the 80s.

I think the article lacks evidence that anything has changed recently.

Scrooge would probably agree wholeheartedly.

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.

Rent controls are great if you already have a place

Controlling real estate supply should be in every local government playbook.

They already do, you need permission from local government to build almost anything in Britain.

The UK rental rights don't really have rent controls as they're normally conceived: the two limits are rent can only go up once a year and that it must be roughly in line with similar properties in the market or area, i.e. explicitly rents follow the market.

The renters rights act is already seemingly leading to distortion in the market - it's not really the price controls as per se but the inability to do things when the tenant is in place.

the distortion is the slow euthanization of the parasitic buy to let landlord class and a decline in property prices to more affordable levels.

Scrooge would agree wholeheartedly.

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?"

Does “The final decision is made by a judge” mean “workers rights can ultimately be arbitrated by a judge when escalated”, or “judges arbitrate all workers rights complaints”? If the former, i believe that’s reasonable; if the latter, thats nuts - and I might not balk at a statement like yours (“abolishes…”).

What part of ending no fault eviction is feel good nonsense? People not being able to be evicted from their homes arbitrarily is a bad thing?

>People not being able to be evicted from their homes arbitrarily is a bad thing?

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.

A lot of "rights" were created with the assumption that they would be used sparingly and would never have been enacted if everyone was going to use them. You just don't have a working civilization if everyone is collecting disability, renters don't pay rent, and nothing can be built.

There's neither a right nor a "right" for everyone to collect disability, to not pay rent, and to stop anyone from building.

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.

I think that's basically true, but the barriers exist because the state can't realistically afford a 100% take-up rate. Adding friction means people who don't really need say the extra £100 a month often won't bother with the hassle, while people who genuinely need it are more likely to decide it's worth the effort.

Obviously that's a very messed up and broken system. I'm not defending it at all.

The state absolutely can afford a 100% take up rate. It chooses not to for ideological reasons.

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 problem then doesn't have to do with AI specifically, it requires human intervention and vetting. If the problem is "someone submitted an AI-written request that got rubberstamped", the problem is the stamp, not the AI.

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.

It's not a binary. If you expect to receive 90 meritorious complaints and 10 bad ones, a review procedure with no false negatives and 10% false positives will give you the wrong outcome 1% of the time. You might be OK with that depending on the cost of a false positive. But if the rise of AI means you get 100 meritorious complaints and 100 bad ones, and you apply the same process, now your processing costs have doubled and your error rate has quintupled.

But if it requires human vetting, and AI massively increases the volume of requests, then it also massively increases the effort to properly vet those requests.

So it’s not implausible that the “justice” system is automated, using AI, to enable it to cope with the deluge of claims.

This mirrors the current increases in open source pull requests and CVEs driven by low-effort AI-aided submissions.

No : rights were put in place because poor people struggled to get them ; the governments then placed hurdle to "control" expenses. On garanteeing housing, the only thing that works to get people out of the streets is state controlled housing. But maybe getting things built is more important ?

You also don't have a civilisation if the extremely rich ignore climate catastrophe, sidestep democracy, and enclose so much of the economy that financial freedom becomes a distant dream for most of the population.

Renters and the disabled are not the problem here.

I think of the legal system in the US. It's easy to find statements about how the entire legal system would collapse if people stopped taking plea bargains because nothing is actually funded or operated in a way that actually guarantees the right to trial in any practical way.

I wonder if the system would actually collapse or people would just sit in jail for 10 years.

The US has things like the right to a speedy trial.

Supposedly, there is a right to a speedy trial, and supposedly, if it is violated, they have to let you go without a trial. Don't know if it is really tested often.

The practical legal definition of "speedy" might not match peoples' intuitive definition.

We would run out of room in jails, hastily contract out construction for rapid expansion, and then people would die en masse in the shoddy camps the contractors deliver.

Yes the economist is arguing that. Most of the rights of this sort were granted under the assumption that most people eligible for the rights would not be able to actually get them. If they can get them, that will be extremely inconvenient for politicians who will have to deal with a large deficit, by either cutting back rights or raising taxes on the wealthy, both of which are career suicide for a politician.

A tacit agreement that while people _should_ have these rights, they all can't have them.

They can, but only if the ultra-rich were less powerful, and that's not allowed.

That would be on brand for The Economist.

the economist is in the market for plausible-sounding prose. much like a large language model, the substance of the argument is a side effect.

The article is suggesting that there was an assumed dynamic in designing these mechanisms for petitions and claims - that there is a threshold of cost (time and effort, mostly) that the petitioner is willing to pay for petitioning the government, and that this cost is, at least to some extent, minimizing frivolous or "lets try it even if it's a long shot" claims.

When the cost of such claims goes to zero, that assumed dynamic will no longer work.

> 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?

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.

Same in the UK. The application process for disability benefits is many pages, and impossible for most people without expert help.

The 'undeserving poor' insanity haunts the ruling class like a decomposing vampire scarecrow.

It's kind of easy to abuse too. I think if you want benefits for life you just claim clinical depression which can't really be disproved. Welfare has exceeded income tax for a while https://fullfact.org/economy/income-tax-versus-welfare-spend... I think we may be a test case for UBI when everyone stops working.

Of course they are, The Economist is to the City of London (the unaccountable pseudo-local authority that is effectively a lobbying group for banks) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. How dare the little people demand the same privileges the feudal aristocracy expect, as do the oligarchs assimilated with them?

The Economist publishes opinion pieces which are just the educated echo of right wing populism.

They are infinitely tolerant of the vagaries and missteps of capital, and hold the state to a standard of perfection no business can attain.

They will never support greater rights for workers or renters. They see those people as the enemy.

> Yet it threatens to become a tragedy of the commons. If the state is overwhelmed and cannot function, everyone loses. When 20th-century governments created broad rights, they had the noble ideal of making citizenship meaningful. The public would be heard in consultations, get information under transparency laws and win redress for maladministration from a panoply of ombudsmen, tribunals, commissioners and judges. But these analogue systems assumed that few people would have the time or temperament to pursue their rights to the bitter end; and that of those who did, few would have the money to pay for a lawyer.

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.

They really show their hand in this one no?

How many PMs has Britain gone through in the past decade?

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.

The function of the bureaucracy in this context is a filter for effort. It naturally filters out people who don't care enough to battle through the bullshit, which is arguably quite an effective way to distribute limited resources to the public.

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.

Exactly this. The overall productivity of not doing something should never be underestimated.

>which is arguably quite an effective way to distribute limited resources to the public.

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.

Let me see if I got this right: - I pay for stuff with my taxes - You add friction to how I access said stuff I paid for - You consider this an “effective distribution” rather than theft

I agree with the rest of your comment.

> I pay for stuff with my taxes - You add friction to how I access said stuff I paid for

I doubt many would be happy to pay the increased taxes required to fund free all-you-can-eat provision.

https://archive.is/IDptA

I have great confidence in the capacity of the British state to ignore any possible volume of petitions for the redress of grievances, and to carry on.

> British state to ignore any possible volume of petitions

Do you live under a rock?

From another country but this is the excuse they use here with some paraphasing. "We have decided not to proceed with your complaint ... It looks like your complaint was generated by AI, it is large in volume and confusing. This is the final decision." This was after confirming every single law was valid, referenced, previous case history also properly referenced, added our points, etc. The funny thing is that they only mentioned AI use as a reason to terminate the investigation after many back and forward emails discussing points that they could understand quite well and we pushed back on. Our last response proved beyond a doubt that the opposite party (also another government department) lied to them. For another complaint for a another government agency straight away told us not use AI and use simple words and not to quote the law as that is not how its done in this country. However, we won that one right before telling them we would self represent in court after many back and forward emails with them saying don't use AI each time.

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.

TBH these rights have been pretty easy to assert beforehand: I've told multiple friends complaining about their landlords what rights they do have and that in a lot of cases they can assert them by inaction (normally, not signing a contract that the landlord or rental agency is implying but not outright saying they need to sign, that would lock them into another long rental period), and they have generally just gone along with it anyway, because they don't want to rock the boat. Not knowing and not being bothered to assert them I think has always been the biggest barrier.

So the civility and caring of modern civilization is a fiction that government can't (or doesn't intend to) actually deliver on and AI is exposing that it's all a fraud/fiction intended to keep us in our place? With everyone realizing it's not:

'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.

The peasants have lawyers now?! No! Must be banned!

> The most important task is to act faster and more radically on remaking the state with AI.

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.

If the government is stupid enough to write law that it cannot enforce when applied by all citizens (and not only those with means), then we should welcome anything which will bring about the demise of those laws.

Lets consider something like the right to take sick leave. There is no strict definition of what "sickness" is. It is something that YOU feel impacts your ability to work. Maybe a bad nights sleep, sore back, headache, runny nose, bad tummy, etc. There's no need to provide any amount of proof to an employer when taking a single day off sick, and they need to pay at least the statutory sick pay, many companies pay full.

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.

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