Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 123 posts

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#71

Post by Dylan16807 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66
thunderfork wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a distinction to be made between "a nuisance complaint" and "a legitimate complaint whose presumptive odds of succeeding in court are less than guaranteed"

When the odds of success are 99% but not 100%, that's not going to deter a lot of people. When the odds of success are 50/50, in this context that's a nuisance complaint because making it "free" to turn all of those into real adjudications would flood the system with exactly the cases where the outcome is unclear which are correspondingly the hardest to efficiently resolve. The only practical way to address that is t…

People are more worried about the worst case than an imaginary average case. Unless you can get insurance for the fee, significant amounts can be a big deterrance even when they're quite unlikely.

1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want. 10% will deter a lot despite those being cases that should happen. Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds. Their fuzzy guessing range is going to include worrying amounts of failure chance even for very strong cases.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#72

Post by Dylan16807 »

ang_cire wrote: post #26
TeMPOraL wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first time I hear something like this; if that's true, then this must be one major case of meaning shift, because since forever I've known and used and seen used this term to refer to the flaws of privatization. The solution to tragedy of the commons is literally a central authority . It's, like, the opposite of "driver of privatization".

Tragedy of the Commons was specifically the idea that cooperation would fail due to selfish competition, so some force was needed to administer it. Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control. In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "na…

Is the argument that "natural" competition is different from selfish competition? And people said that with a straight face?

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#73

Post by weakened_malloc »

jackvalentine wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#74

Post by District5524 »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #52
skew-aberration wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such systems do exist in 'civil law' (vs common law) countries (which are most of them outside the English-speaking world).

Yes, although they don't really obviate the issues raised by GP (costs, length, complexity). If anything, some of the largest civil law countries in Europe, like Germany and Italy, can arguably be considered worse than common law countries in all of these respects. Whether that's incidental or due to civil law, I cannot say.

This is a very simplistic approach in itself that is self contradictory. You can't just lump together all legal proceedings of "largest civil law countries" together and compare that to common law countries in general. Statistics will be very different based on exact type of proceedings, the type of cases you try to compare ... if you can find any reliable statistics at all that compares apples to apples as they say. Take a look at the best the EU has (covering both civil law and common law countries) at https://www.coe.int/en/web/cepej for 2022 data. Italy is indeed an outlier in almost all legal areas, but it's just not in any ways similar to Germany... And I also couldn't point to any clear cliffs between common law and continental law countries. The US works very differently with its own 50 states. They have their own statistics at https://www.ncsctableauserver.org/t/Research/views/TrialDash.... But it's very difficult to do any meaningful comparison with the CEPEJ (Council of Europe) data above. It's very judgmental even to compare seemingly simple things, such as what does actually a "criminal law case" means in one jurisdiction and if that is roughly the same in another. The NCS and CEPEJ are probably well equipped to make decisions on convering the data to be comparable after long deliberations by expert court statisticians doing this all their life... but I wouldn't dare to do that by myself, even if assisted by "Fable 99" and billions of tokens.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#75

Post by simonjgreen »

BrenBarn wrote: post #64
simonjgreen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a thing, and in the context of the article too. In UK, if an employment tribunal finds you’ve wasted the tribunals time they can and do order costs paid for both the tribunal and other party. Odd they don’t mention it.

As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a rich jerk who files a bunch of such complaints, a few million maybe. If you're a giant company that is using the legal system to push people around, $50 billion.

Again, this is covered, to an extent. Speaking only for England & Wales, the courts have pretty broad costs powers. Especially if one party is bringing litigation unreasonably. There’s no ceiling to it either, it just has to be defensible.

It’s also on the court system to leverage procedure correctly to add safeguards against the kind of behaviour you describe.

I understand anecdotally the US system is more open to abuse of this nature, but I don’t know the details. This article though was specific to UK.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#76

Post by District5524 »

skew-aberration wrote: post #32
majormajor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

Such systems do exist in 'civil law' (vs common law) countries (which are most of them outside the English-speaking world).

I'm not sure I understand what you are referring to here. The lack of a jury system, or no trial procedures? Both common law and 'civil law' has quite similar forensic expert and arbitration systems. One thing I can think of as a difference is that in civil law notary systems (and civil cases), you may request an out-of-court preliminary evidence taking. But you can have something similar in pre-trial discovery/disclosure in common law, at least in the UK (where you don't have jury system at all in civil cases).

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#77

Post by charcircuit »

wavemode wrote: post #54
charcircuit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get rejected you can appeal the part the AI rejected the same as if you get rejected by a judge.

The loser of every suit will simply always appeal the AI decision, thus requiring a human decision anyway.

AI would review the appeal so that only things which require human decision receive human attention.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#78

Post by Tarq0n »

charcircuit wrote: post #49
eddythompson80 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s just a deficit of state capacity. 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…

If you get rejected you can appeal the part the AI rejected the same as if you get rejected by a judge.

There's still inequality in someone else receiving a false positive approval from the AI while another gets rejected. Equal treatment and stochastic systems don't mix.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#79

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

#80

Post by gampleman »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That deters honest complaints from poor plaintiffs. The Economist may approve, but justice shouldn't depend on the relative finances and/or power and status of the opposing parties. Of course it does, often. But that's a pathology, not a feature to be proud of. It's true that some complaints are irrational, vindictive, or vexatious, but the system seems quite good at identifying those already.

> That deters honest complaints from poor plaintiffs. If the complaint has a high probability of success then it has a low probability of making the plaintiff pay costs. If it has a low probability of success then isn't that what we're trying to deter?

Probability of success and merit are different things.

For instance if you know for a fact that you have been fired due to your race (perhaps you were outright told this is the case), but have no evidence (you weren't recording and there were no witnesses), your case has merit (it really did happen), but unless you get lucky and some evidence appears in discovery your odds of success are miniscule.

I'd argue that in such a case preventing such a person from seeking justice would be wrong, since they were really victims and diserve redress.

Post reply on HN