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The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
91–100 of 118 posts
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did this for a few federal agencies, here a few examples https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investig... https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl LMK if you want to know more.
I do, though I'm not entirely sure what am I looking at on those links. Could you start by explaining that? They look like training courses or something. I saw a sequence diagram browsing around, seemed to be specific to a sample scenario?
I fixed my open protocols yesterday because they explain the flows better: https://ice.dhs.dev/protocol/13729 hope this helps.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have quite a few tribunals, ombudspeople, and other non court dispute resolution services in Canada. Typically, the arbitrator is very well versed in the rules/area they are enforcing, and can see right through a snow job. In my province there is a tenancy tribunal that has to make a ruling before a court gets involved, and the courts rarely disagree with a decision made by the arbitrator in the 1% of cases that d…
Sounds good, but what's to stop the party with more money to appeal the ombudsperson decision if it's not to their liking and then apply the "we have a whole legal department for this" strategy?
Legal expenses can be assigned to the loser much easier than in the US.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#94I 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...
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this article quite myopic. This is not a “tragedy of the commons”, it’s just a deficit of state capacity. The state needs to use AI to make bureaucracy instantaneous. That’s the only option, unless you ban AI for this kind of thing (not gonna happen).
> 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…
I don’t equate “the commons” to “the state”. Part of the point of the commons was that it was unregulated and shared. The state is one solution to the tragedy of the commons, but not the only one.
I don’t view “the state” as a commons. It’s a separate beast. The commons is explicitly owned by all, and I think that’s a faulty model for the state.
And to your objection - you’re just objecting to the bad implementation. Obviously we should build it good, not bad - just like every policy. And just like every state action we at least know will not get the perfect version. There is no axiomatic necessity to any of the concerns you raised, and I feel they are obvious points that need to be considered in the design.
But if you have other policy ideas do share! As I said I don’t see another path, realistically speaking.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#96Earlier 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.
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.
The law is already a stochastic system and it's designed to eventually receive a result that is correct most of the time. It doesn't try to be 100% correct. Not having it be 100% correct does not cause society to fall over.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rang…
> Unless you can get insurance for the fee, significant amounts can be a big deterrance even when they're quite unlikely.
But then won't experts be offering that insurance on easy to win cases left and right?
> 1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want.
You don't actually want to deter meritorious cases at all, but we don't have that as an option. You can either have more false negatives or more false positives. Requiring either one to be zero is going to make the other one unsustainably large.
And that's the case even if there isn't any formal penalty for filing a losing case, because there is still a time cost. This is actually the "problem" AI is creating -- the time cost still isn't zero but now it's lower and therefore less able to serve its previous role of deterring frivolous cases.
> Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds.
Having something that can tell them that is essentially required regardless or they'll be continuously initiating cases with a <1% chance of success.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#98I'll read the article once I can get past the paywall, but something important to note in the meantime: "The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a…
> The features of successful systems The tragedy of the commons is what happens in the unsuccessful systems.
The point is that the issue isn't the commons (lack of direct ownership), it's culture and accountability for actions (the existence or lack of responsibility). TTOTC rides on the idea that systems, as a rule, fall into chaos and anarchy without a clear owner, but that's simply not true.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#99I'll read the article once I can get past the paywall, but something important to note in the meantime: "The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a…
Isn't Ostrom just saying that with effective regulations informed by local knowledge, it is possible for shared resources to be successfully managed? The "tragedy of the commons" is just what happens in the absence of effective rules governing the use of a resource when individuals are free to act in their own interests.
That's not a "tragedy of the commons," then. It's a "tragedy of ineffective governance." And governance doesn't have to be top-down.
Re: The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
#100I'll read the article once I can get past the paywall, but something important to note in the meantime: "The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a…
Ostrom didn’t “debunk” the tragedy of the commons. She showed that it can be avoided when you have stable communities, clear boundaries, repeated interactions, monitoring, and real consequences for free riders. The problem is that those conditions are much harder to maintain in a highly mobile, anonymous modern society. When people can easily enter, exit, and dump costs on strangers, trust and enforcement break down…
She showed that the commons wasn't the common element in systems that weren't sustainable. If the "tragedy" is that every commonly-held asset is doomed to destruction, and you have common, predictable examples of ones that don't, the thesis is debunked.
>The problem is that those conditions are much harder to maintain in a highly mobile, anonymous modern society.
This also isn't true. You don't need identities when the heuristic is behavior, and action can be taken by either the public or by agents empowered by the public.