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- Hacker News
- 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.by m101
- 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.
by Philip-J-Fry - > 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.
by chrisjj - The peasants have lawyers now?! No! Must be banned!
- 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.
by _DeadFred_ - 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.by rcxdude
- 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.by delichon
- > British state to ignore any possible volume of petitions
Do you live under a rock?
by mhh__ - 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.
by pizzly - 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.
by nojs - Exactly this. The overall productivity of not doing something should never be underestimated.
- 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.
by ozozozd - >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.
by rcxdude - 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.
- > 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.
by pessimizer - They really show their hand in this one no?by olelele
- > 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.
- 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.by crooked-v
- That would be on brand for The Economist.by dfxm12
- 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.by lukewarm707
- 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.by wmf
- > 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.
by jjav - 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.
by chanakya - 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.by mitxela
- > 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.
by mhh__