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AI Destroys Institutions

papers.ssrn.com

111–120 of 165 posts

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, then we can safely give your comments exactly the same treatment - since they are completely uninformed speculation about a paper you haven't read.

And you must have read all 40 pages of it, right? Because if not you are a hypocrite. I claim that the Bible is the literal truth. Oh, you haven't read every word of the Bible? Your arguments against me are worthless!

I did actually read all 40 pages of it. I frequently read law journal articles, among with lots of other types of journals and papers.

I also used to maintain up to date reading lists of various areas (compiler optimization, for example) because I would read so many of the papers.

Let me give you a piece of advice:

First, gather facts, then respond.

Here you start by sarcastically asserting i wouldn't have read it, but it would generally be better to ask if i read it (fact gathering), and then devise a response based on my answer. Because your assertion is simply wrong, making the rest of it even sillier.

As for the strawman about the bible - i'm kinda surprised you are really trying to equate not reading any part of something with not reading every part of something, and really trying to defend what you did here, instead of just owning up to it and moving on.

This speaks a lot more about you than anything else.

That said -

When you make a claim covering that everything in a book is the literal truth, you only have to find a part that is not the literal truth to prove the claim wrong. Which may or may not require reading the entire thing to start (if it turns out your counter-claim is wrong, you at least have to read and find another)

In the original comment, you'll note your claim was "This is nothing but speculation" - IE all of the paper is speculation.

If we are being accurate, this would require you reading the entire thing to be able to say all of it is speculation. How could you know otherwise?

Even if we were being nice, and treat your claim colloquially as meaning "most of it is speculation", this would still require reading some of the paper, which you didn't do either.

Perhaps you should just quit while you are behind, and learn that when you screw up, the correct thing to do is say "yeah, i screwed up, i should have read it before saying that", instead of trying to double down on it.

Doubling down like this just makes you look worse.

As an aside - I was always an avid reader, and very bored in synagogue, so i have read every word of a number of books of the hebrew bible because it was more interesting than paying attention to the sermons.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#112
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Get owned in court because you used an LLM that made a poor legal argument. 2. Get owned out of court because you couldn't afford the $100K (minimum) that you have to pay to the lawyer's cartel to even be able to make your argument in front of a judge. I'll take number 1. At least you have a fighting chance. And it's only going to get better. LLMs today are the worst they will ever be, whereas the lawyer's cartel…

Does it cost 100k minimum in the US to get a lawyer? Or am I misunderstanding something?

There is no "get a lawyer." You pay by the hour. And there is months to years of procedure before the judge even knows your lawsuit exists.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#113
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge. The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing…

> it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

Rehashing text in a language is not mastering that language, and no, is not feared by linguists.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#114
post #61

None of these paper's arguments are AI specific. The IRS doesn't need AI to make mistakes and be unable to tell you why it did so. You can find stories of that happening to people already.

i think when most people bring up mistakes that these models make, much of their concern is that little can be done. when one of the juniors makes a mistake, i can talk to them about it and help them understand where they went wrong, if they continue to make mistakes we can change their position to something more suited for them. we can always let them go if they have too much hubris to learn. who do we hold to accou…

Who was held to account when the IRS made a mistake and sent me a demand letter for over $100K of "unpaid taxes" I didn't owe? Who compensated me for the hours I spent on hold and the money I had to pay an accountant to deal with it?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better that I'm forced to rent an LLM from a tech monopolist for a few dollars than be forced to hire a member of the lawyers cartel for $500 an hour.

Come now. You mean the highly regulated, more competitive world of law? That too, as it is practiced in America? The once capital of economic competition? That “cartel”? Vs the leaders of an industry that built their tools through insane amounts of copyright infringement, and have forced the coining of “enshittification” to describe all pervasive business strategies? The same industry which employs acqui-hire to find…

The industry where you can be a paralegal for 20 years, but not allowed to even attempt to take the bar exam because you haven't paid your $250K and 3 years lost earnings to get your degree from the lawyer's cartel? That "competitive" industry?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#116
post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

This is a criticism of the author's backgrounds rather than the content of the article.

"Oxycodone is Not Addictive" by employee of Perdue Pharma.

It absolutely makes sense to criticize the author's background.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#117
post #29
post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

It's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality…

The people who stand to benefit are you. If I have to pay a lawyer $1000 to review a contract, or spend $10 in tokens, I win. OpenAI may make $9 off of those tokens, or they may make $1. But that doesn't matter at all to me. I care about the $1000 vs $10, not the $9 vs $1.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#118

>Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust... In the 1960s, trust in institutions was around 70%. In 2025 it's about 17%. This is not something like we had 7…

It's not a false hump, but why do you assume the president caused it just because it happened at the same time?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#120
I think the argument makes a central mistake in putting too much trust into institutions. I don’t disagree with the conclusions, but the premise around blindly trusting institutions simply because they’ve been around for a long time lost me from taking most of their arguments seriously, despite opening the article thinking I would agree.
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