Judge decides case based on AI-hallucinated case law

[Cergorach]

The question that remains is, "do we still have unfilled jobs to fill?".

Generally yes, but not enough, that's why we create new jobs. Did the Doordash delivery person exist in 2010? Did the YouTuber exist before 2000? These things might be the most known inconsequential jobs, but there are so many others less known, but way more important. People also act as if other people can be only one thing, they can't learn new stuff, they shouldn't have to learn new stuff. And even if it's cutting edge stuff, it's young people from a new generation, they are now doing this new job and not an old one, thus making room for the workforce.

Now imagine that from an IT perspective, someone learned on Windows 3.11 and should not be forced to learn anything new... How much use would such an IT person be today if they didn't learn new things. You don't want to know the amount of pushback we got from IT personnel managing Windows Servers locally, when we started migrating folks to the cloud. The primary reason: we were taking their current jobs and forcing them to either learn something new or become obsolete. Many, many of those people could do that when push came to shove, some moved into managing those new cloud services, others moved to different branches of IT.

And it's not just IT people that need to keep learning new things, it's every profession. How many illustrators started learning digital tools? How many musicians? Even the manual labor jobs, folks needed to learn how to use a nailgun, new materials, new products, new rules, etc. Progress. And sure there are folks that can't keep up, that's why you need safety nets, so those folks don't fall flat on their face, but those people are a LOT less then people make them out to be.

I don't know precisely which events you are speaking of, so I won't try to address them. But, broadly and historically speaking, major job dislocation isn't just, "They find another job." Jobs that they are trained for go away, and don't exist. For many, if a next job exists, it is a lower-paying role. Job dislocation will cause many to spend their savings, so families lose generational wealth, or ability to retire. Folks lose their healthcare, their housing. Substance addiction rates among those impacted rise.

Let me start that I grew up and live in a different country/culture (Netherlands), so my perspective and experiences are different from yours. I'm 49 and when I say youth, think '80s. We have relatively very little generational wealth, as our wealth is taxed, and then also inheritance is VERY heavily taxed. On the flipside we have social safety nets and people don't loose their healthcare when they loose their job. There are also processes in place where people either get retrained internally at a company or if they can't find a job in their current field are retrained by state run programs.

Even then, we've imported workers from Morocco and Turkey in the '60s-'70s as our local populations wanted to work in less physical jobs. After the Wall fell, starting in the '90s we had pretty big influxes of Eastern European workers. Still unemployment now has not been so low since 1975... For the last 50 years we've created more jobs then our population growth was able to support (in the end).

Now, this is not representative of the rest of the world, but it's an indication how things can work. And it's not as if where I live is a backwater country that doesn't do progress. Most people can move along with the progress, the small percentage that can't, we have social safety nets for. And addiction rates are not just tied to folks loosing their jobs, way more have addiction issues while they have a job.

By no means am I saying that the world should not adopt technological change. I am saying that wonton adoption causes harm that we can mitigate if we actually approach things thoughtfully. You would see much less resistance to change if you actually offered those who will be impacted something to help them through that change, or you targeted the change to boost, rather than replace, the people impacted.

Thoughtfully according to whom? If we would grade it along the lowest common denominator, we would still be living in the stone age. I'm not saying, don't care about other people, but don't make it an excuse either. Looking specifically at the US, there were and are already far greater issues, even before the general availability of LLM and image generation, and no one cared enough to fix that... It's either the folks that are potentially financially impacted, those that can profit from speaking out (license fees) or folks that have no skin in the game at all and doesn't cost them anything to shout "Boo!" from the sidelines.

I don't drink alcohol, never have, never will. So for me it's easy to say: "Ban all alcohol!". I don't drive cars (it's just a safer world without me behind the wheel), so It's easy to say "Ban all personal vehicles!". Because I have no skin in the game, I'm not giving up anything, it doesn't cost me anything. So do the folks that don't use LLM and image generation, they don't use it in the first place so they can easily call for a ban.

I don't have anything against LLM or image generation, I use both. But I have issues with it's use and usefulness. ChatGPT pretty much gave LLM a public boost 3 years ago, but both LLM and image generation (and related technologies) were already available before then. Examples include 'AI' support tools, both for phones, chat and email. Certain companies moved far too fast on that technology and replaced people with software and that often turned into disasters, even if they were able to recover from that, they had trouble getting folks back for those jobs as people knew that if the technology improved they could be fired again like that. Even today Apple's 'AI' software still thinks I'm calling about an iPhone when I'm clearly saying "AirPods Max"...

The nature of LLM is that it doesn't know the answer, it just gives you word strings that you expect and statistically belong together. LLMs can be useful, as long as you 'know the answer', if it's just a system with no expert human oversight, it's going to cuase so many issues! An example of that is the hallucinated case law that none of the lawyers were expert enough to detect it or wise enough to double check. This is also why I currently don't use LLM for work (and image generation isn't generally not that useful in IT), I generally work on projects that are either edgecase, very new stuff or custom solutions for customers. Add to that that many customers haven't gotten approval from both their security and legal departments for using specific LLM solutions (eventhough many folks still use LLM despite those limitations). The problem imho isn't LLM or image generation, it's the people not using it properly, and in my experience this is most of them. It's interesting, it has potential, but so do nuclear reactors and I don't see everyone building reactors in their basement and backyard...

 

[Gorgon Zee]

When we replaced our hunters-gatherer with peasants, it freed manpower to occupy jobs as shaman and soothsayers that we needed greatly. When we had enough of them and they invented a lot of new technology with their free time, we had a hard time turning enough peasants into craftsmen, until agricultural progress (and demographic increase) allowed for more peasants to turn into workers.

Well ... not quite. The transition from hunters-gatherer to farmer meant that land became valuable, so the optimal strategy for a culture was to use the excess people not needed for food creation as a means to own more food-producing land. The first big revolution was not from hunter-gatherers to experts and technicians, it was to warriors.

The big early tech was then focused around how to more efficiently kill people and take their land.

 

[Umbran]

Thing is, those individual situations are not showing at a more macro level, so for every family that lived worse due to the change, another family lived much better than before, so it is more than compensating overall.

During my lifetime, no, it has not. Real wages have remained basically flat for most of the American population since about 1979. That's not "more than compensating" - that's treading water.

Cite: Real Wage Trends, 1979-2019, Congressional Research Service.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

It is of course of no comfort to the family that is living worse, but that's why societies, in general, have developped public policies to mitigate the widening of inqualities.

Discussion of public policy gets us into politics. So, I will limit myself to noting that "mitigating" inequality is patching over the fact that the inequalities exist, rather than correcting the actual inequality.

Focusing on average households, the same observation can be made: even excluding the top 10% of wages, the average, inflation-adjusted wage increased by 43,7% between 1979 and now in the US according to the economic policy institute.

The Congressional Budget office says otherwise. From 1979 to 2019, real (meaning inflation-adjusted) wages grew

41.3% for the 90th percentile, top earners
8.8% for the 50th percentile
6.5% for the 10th percentile.

That bottom is so low that, for some groups (for example - men) real wages have fallen by 3% for the 50th percentile, and dropped 7.7% for the 10th percentile.

It doesn't mean nobody in Detroit suffered, it means that on average, workers got wealthier

Again, not really true, as above - the person in the middle or below isn't having an easier time putting bread on the table, getting kids educated, or buying a home. Especially when you realize that wages do not equal wealth - increased wages in that top 10% may be getting eaten by other costs - like education debt - leaving them with less actual wealth increase overall than wages might imply.

so any observation of a single family being negatively affected is more than compensated, overall, by another family getting richer at the same time (ie, for one affected family in Detroit, there is a family that is living much better in the Silicon Valley).

Even if it were a simple one-for-one trade, that would be just shuffling around who gets to be poor from one decade to the next. If that's all you are going to do with technological advancement, why bother advancing?

But, in reality, it isn't a one-for-one trade. We are not in some zero-sum game among the wage earners!

In 1979, the US population was about 219 million, and the GDP was about $2.6 trillion dollars.
In 2023, the US population was about 343 million, and the GDP was abotu $27 trillion dollars.

Population increased by about 56%. Real wages increased about 6-8% for the bulk of them. But the overall wealth produced each year increased by a factor of 10.

That wealth is going somewhere - but it isn't to the wage earners who are technically producing that wealth - or real wages could have risen far more than 6% to 8%. It is getting siphoned out of the wage system entirely.

 

[Staffan]

The law is a bachelor.

The law is a dagger that is gripped by the blade.

In practice, the law favors class, wealth, privilege and other factors besides. Without those, you're down to pure luck or a sympathetic judge, and hopefully some nice people in the jury box to gamble with your fate when you show up at the casino in your suit and tie, hoping that you look sincere.

Laws Are Threats #shorts

"You guys wanna make some bacon?" - Bud Cubby

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