The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

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.

    > Interim relief is a case study of how AI, like a heat-seeking missile, can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030.
    > 
    > Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access.

There are a lot of laws that exist on the corporate and individual level solely for the purpose of selective enforcement to throw "the book" at the unpopular; the insurgents; or the under-resourced. It's an implicit component of the legal system.

For example, a fossil fuel utility, Entergy, stopped an insurgent wind farm / project by arguing that the startup making HVDC lines, Clean Line Energy, couldn't make power lines, because only utilities could make power lines. And to be a utility you need to have power lines. From the paper, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads...

    > Entergy pointed out that only public utilities can build transmission lines in Arkansas, and that Arkansas law defines “public utility” as a company that “own[s] or operat[es] in [Arkansas] equipment or facilities for...transmitting...power to or for the public for compensation.”152 The Arkansas law creates a catch22. Because Clean Line did not own or operate any transmission lines in Arkansas, it was not a public utility. And because it was not a public utility, it was not authorized to build transmission lines. 

    > In 2011, a fossil fuel utility convinced the Arkansas Public Service Commission to deny certification because the wind company had no existing transmission infrastructure, and so did not fit the legal definition of a “utility.” In 2017, the Illinois Supreme Court denied certification for the same reason. The Missouri Public Service Commission claimed that certification was not in the public interest because “harm” to landowners “outweighed any in-state benefits.” Projections for the wind project, however, suggested that it would create over 1,500 jobs and reduce electricity prices for Missourians by over $10 million annually.

    > In 2016, authorities in Oklahoma prosecuted bartender Colin Grizzle for serving vodkas infused with flavors like bacon and pickles. The practice, though popular with patrons, violated Title 37, Chapter 3, Section 584 of the Oklahoma Code.

    > In 2012, a Minnesota man, Mitch Faber, was jailed for the crime of not finishing the siding on his own house.

    > In 2011, North Carolina authorities prosecuted Steven Pruner for selling hot dogs from his food cart outside the Duke University Medical Center without a permit. Pruner was sentenced to 45 days of police custody.

Usually, there's been an information asymmetry between ordinary people and the powers that be who know these aspects of law. It's not easy to find such loopholes unless you spend time studying statutes. The parameters are too vague and the laws are usually written in an obtuse way that non-specialists find hard to decode.

Enter LLMs.

Machines can and will reason over otherwise vague queries and retrieve these laws. And as these laws and regulations are still valid, they can then assist the individual with calling for enforcement / compliance.

The Economist assumes that most of these cases are false. I would like to argue an alternative perspective.

If these complaints were fake, then surely they would be dismissed? If the petitioners were out of line, then the companies shouldn't have cause to worry.

If you assert they're false over a "common sense" standard, then why does the regulation exist?

If the regulation itself is vague and wrong, then why have these regulations persisted in both use and letter over time?

Why are individuals and upstarts at fault for doing something the government, institutions and large corporations have been doing since the dawn of time?

Why dost thou protest, "How dare they shine a floodlight on my crime?"

For a bit of history, the term was the title of a 1968 essay [1] based in part on ideas that originated earlier. It becamse popular as a driver for privatization of government services in many Western nations based on the (flawed) idea that privatization would increase "efficiency". All it did was transfer wealth from customers with inelastic demand to newly-minted private owners.

But it never seemed to match reality. The opposite seemed to be true: private resources became over-exploited whereas shared or public resources were successfully managed and shared by communities across the world in some cases going back centuries. This culminated in Elinor Ostrom [2] winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for officially debunking the idea.

Now I understand how ordinary people still quote this debunked idea. It did become popular. But journalists, particularly those for a publication called The Economist, should know better.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

"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 reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.