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- Hacker News
- Article with paywall bypassed:
https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/...
- by urban_winter
- by suoloordi
- I think AI will be one of the great equalizers in this respect.
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...
by epsteingpt - by sscaryterry
- This affects so much more than just employment law. There is a steady increase of AI-assisted complaints to UK regulators.by sscaryterry
- It seems to be an assumption at this point that the massive increase is of frivolous suits/applications.
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.
by pbhjpbhj - Even the “pre-case” legal stuff is out of control. In my Australian organisation we’ve noticed a deluge of what I can only call “privacy demands” that talk the talk… but have the jurisdiction or subject legislation wrong.
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.
- Yep, and the cost is borne by the receiver of the letter. The person sending shitty LawyerGPT messages will just keep doing it until there’s consequences, but there aren’t any.by maccard
- Is it any different to how it was previously? Before the age of AI, companies write all sorts of bullshit stuff into ToS or EULA which was neither enforceable or legal yet they routinely got away with it because Joe Schmoe had no ability to assess their arguments or fight back.
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.
- by Versipelle
- Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.by mwkaufma
- Anthropic is a sponsor of The Economist. So maybe that influences their retoric somewhat.by andersmurphy
- TFA ends on this note though, which seems pro-labor:
> 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.
by keeda - The original Tragedy of the commons was largely made up
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of...
by stuaxo - From the article:
"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."
by Gander5739 - Maybe we need a better-scaling legal system that does not take years to resolve simple disputes. I am not convinced AI can replace lawyers, but more people having access to the law without extremely costly fees does sound good to me.by dozerly
- I don’t see how that helps?
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.
by MichaelZuo - The answer is in the article. There needs to be a financial mechanism to deter nuance complaints. A small penalty for lodging a complaint and losing.
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)
by jay_kyburz - AI doesn't give you a lawyer service without fees though. It makes you feel like you're getting a lawyer service, then you show up in court and say what the AI tells you to say and lose ten times your net worth because what the AI told you to say was legally nonsense.by inigyou
- With frontier models, I have found so many self contradicting points in Indian tax law that I would rather welcome a good AI helping to reduce discretionary powers of officers via highly subjective interpretations. This power asymmetry is basically the driver for a lot of developing world corruption.by newyankee
- Moving from an adversarial each-party-has-lawyers-presenting-as-extreme-a-case-as-possibly-can-be-made-for-their-side system to something more like expert arbitrators and independent/court fact-finders would avoid the 'bury them in paperwork and filings' lawyer-cost explosions.
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?
by majormajor