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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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