With frontier models, I have found so many self contradicting points in Indian tax law that I would rather welcome a good AI helping to reduce discretionary powers of officers via highly subjective interpretations. This power asymmetry is basically the driver for a lot of developing world corruption.

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 our system is already doing that AND costing way more anyway, barring entry entirely to many, is that so much worse? Even assuming we can't try to regulate that?

The answer is in the article. There needs to be a financial mechanism to deter nuance complaints. A small penalty for lodging a complaint and losing.

This fee should help pay for the courts and reimburse and employer for time spent defending itself.

(With the judge / magistrate able to wave the fee on compassionate grounds)

I don’t see how that helps?

A lawyer isn’t going to sign on to take liability risk unless they spend quite a lot of time analyzing the AI’s outputs for possible blunders?

So it structurally can’t cost significantly less.

From the article:

"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."

TFA ends on this note though, which seems pro-labor:

> But it would present employers with a different problem. If AI fulfils its promise, it could before long give every worker the equivalent of a top-flight lawyer in their pocket, able to file precisely constructed cases against their bosses at will. A deluge of slop claims could give way to a wave of winning ones. Labour said its act would shift power from employers to workers. With AI, power will move faster and further than the politicians imagined.

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".

You can have a tragedy or not, Ostrom didn’t show it’s always well managed by the public. One can say ‘tragedy of the commons’ while still knowing about solutions where it’s not a tragedy anymore

> The features of successful systems

The tragedy of the commons is what happens in the unsuccessful systems.

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.

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 — which is basically where the tragedy of the commons comes from.