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AI Destroys Institutions

papers.ssrn.com

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Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#81

Post by incomingpain »

>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 70% until 2023 and then AI dropped our trust suddenly. If anything, AI doesnt even register on the graph.

So correlation here is practically non-existent. Gallup and Pew have the similar trends for journalists and universities.

You dont get to blame AI for this.

Interesting bump and question. How did clinton improve reputation and then bush destroy it? Or is that a false hump?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#82

Post by t0bia_s »

terminalshort wrote: post #58
DannyBee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush? I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start? I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken…

I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons: 1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future. 2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome. 3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.) Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is…

3. Same, including press that is no longer unbiased and serve as propaganda of political opinions.

One might say that deinstitutionalization is actually good for plurality of opinions (some call it a democracy). If AI cause it, I'm fine with that.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#83

Post by rpdillon »

well_ackshually wrote: post #47
terminalshort wrote: post #24

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

Please go to court using only ChatGPT as legal defense, I'd love to see it, it's going to make for great entertainment. The judge a little bit less so. You can criticise the hourly cost of lawyers all you like, and it should be a beautiful demonstration to people like you that no, "high costs means more people go into the profession and lower the costs" is not and has never been a reality. But to think that any AI co…

Yeah, unfortunately, it's the lawyers that are using ChatGPT.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#84

Post by hoherd »

qsera wrote: post #41

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think. Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones. But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!

> We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.

I had a wake up call on this yesterday. After a recent HN thread about Zed editor, I decided to give it another try, so I loaded it up, disabled AI, and tried writing some code from scratch. No AI completion, no intellisence. Two things came to mind. First, my editor seems so much more peaceful without being told what to do. Second, it was a bit scary how lost I felt. It was obvious that my own ability to communicate through code had declined a bit since I began using AI coding assistants. It turns out that as expected, coding assistants really are competitive cognitive artifacts. After that experience, I've decided that I am going to do at least part of my coding with all completions turned off. Unfortunately at work you are paid to produce quickly, so I think my AI free editor will have to be reserved for personal projects.

Further related to your statement about thought, the hallucinations persist, and even last night I got a response about 80's pop culture that was over 50% bullshit. Just imagine what intentional persuasion through LLM models will do to society. Independent thought has never been more important.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#85

Post by getnewmaterial »

t0bia_s wrote: post #80
qsera wrote: post #41

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think. Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones. But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!

Similar rhetoric was allways there with new technologies. Calculators, radio, cameras, phones, computers, smartphones, social networks... Regulations do more harm than learning process from mistakes.

Yes we have this before and everytime it was correct.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#86

Post by rpdillon »

DannyBee wrote: post #51
terminalshort wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's written in the future tense, so I can safely call it speculation. I've read the abstract which is all I need to decide the full text is not worth my time.

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.

Is he incorrect that the paper is speculating about future events? I don't think it's completely uninformed either. He said that he's read the abstract, which is supposed to give you an impression of the structure of the argument. Why don't you engage with the criticism?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#87

Post by cornholio »

I would summarize the central claim of the paper as: the widespread use of AI to mediate human interaction will rob people of agency, understanding and skill development, as well as destroying the social links necessary to maintain and improve institutions, while at the same time allowing powerful unaccountable actors (AI cabal) to interject into those relations and impose their institutional goals; by "institution" we mean a shared set of beneficial social rules, not merely an organization tasked with promoting them, "justice" vs. "US justice system".

The authors then break down the mechanisms by which AI achieves these outcomes (that seem quite reductive and dated compared to the frontier, for example they take it as granted that AI cannot be creative, that it can only work prospectively and can't react to new situations and events etc.), as well as exemplifying those mechanism already at work in a few areas like journalism and academia.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#88

Post by 7952 »

rfv6723 wrote: 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…

Isn't that just an ad-hominem against the writers? A threat to the status quo is still a threat to people and could have negative consequences.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#89

Post by chrisjj »

qsera wrote: post #41

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think. Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones. But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!

This is the way "AI" will deliver on the promise to become more intelligent than humans. Or at least than humans who believe in it.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#90

Post by rpdillon »

terminalshort wrote: post #58
DannyBee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush? I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start? I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken…

I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons: 1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future. 2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome. 3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.) Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is…

Yeah, I haven't gotten through the 40 pages myself, but skimming through the material, it does seem that the arguments rely on an assumption that AI will be employed in a particular manner. For example, when discussing the rule of law, they assert that AI will be making the moral judgments and will be a black box that humans will just turn to to decide what to do in criminal proceedings. But that seems like it would be the dumbest possible way to use the technology.

Perhaps that's the point of the paper: to warn us not to use the technology in the dumbest possible way.

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