‘Bullshit asymmetry’. This memorable phrase was used by Cambridge law professor Catherine Barnard at a round table and podcast hosted recently by law firm RPC. She was discussing a new challenge faced by lawyers in companies and in the court and tribunal system: they are progressively drowning under a torrent of largely irrelevant material generated by poorly briefed AI agents deployed by aggrieved and aggressive clients or consumers. It takes disproportionate time to unpack nonsense from a report generated by AI before one can draft anything meaningful.
So much for claims that AI is everywhere contributing to growth, efficiency and cost reduction.
(Poor) Lawfare
Consumers and stakeholders who may, for years, have felt ignored by large faceless companies are now getting their revenge and it is hurting businesses, charities and local and central government. One company’s director of legal affairs told the gathering that it is receiving in one week the number of subject access requests that they used to receive in a year. Ninety nine in every hundred pages may be irrelevant to the merits of the claim, but it still has to be gone through and replied to. And often, when the reply is sent, the company receives by return a fresh wave of pseudo-technical challenges.
Perhaps this is justice for some companies – those which for too long hid behind automated systems Now the consumer is the one hiding behind automated systems. Those who want to be aggressive and disruptive have a new weapon. What shall we call it?
‘Lawfare’ is the term used when Russian oligarchs and Manchester City owners assemble armies of expensive lawyers to intimidate their opponents. What should we call this? Perhaps Poor Lawfare?
Superintelligence or Artificial Attention Deficit Syndrome?
Yet we also learned that with the availability of AI, behaviour is changing inside companies. Senior people observe employees becoming more transactional.
20 years ago in my own organisation colleagues might complain that they had been unable to get a reply. I would test how hard they had tried. Some would say that they had sent several emails and be most surprised when I asked if they had tried calling the person. An easy-to-use technology had allowed them to become more passive.
Now technology makes it easier still. We can outsource the writing of an email reply. Why bother to think about our drafting when the agent can do it for us?
Technology cannot be blamed. Our response to it can. The fault, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony might put it, lies not in our Large Language models but in our selves that we have become submissive underlings.
When technology makes our lives easier it can also make us lazier and less attentive to relationships. This happened previously as we first took up the benefits of social media. Alongside the communication convenience came the unanticipated consequences -trolling; cyber-bullying; screen addiction; social isolation and, for some, depression.
Organisations are now discovering new and unanticipated AI side-effects. Call it a new form of organisational ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome) – alluring short cuts with damaging consequences for the collective intelligence of the organisation. People are abandoning those forms of communication that sustain relationships.
Reasserting the importance of relationships
The best leaders will get a grip. It is time to reassert the role of relationships in running a successful organisation. Managers will rediscover the importance of walking the office floor, visiting customer premises; popping into the warehouse or the data centre; initiating those random conversations which give prompt spontaneous and honest feedback and create bonds of mutual understanding. These are irreplaceably human tasks.
In a powerful blog, Margaret Heffernan reported that
More than a few finance houses stopped recruiting graduates last year—confident that AI would be better, faster, cheaper—only to recruit in a frenzy this summer.
An organisation that surrenders its human responsiveness will lose ground to more sensitive competitors. Listening matters.
So much for organisations. What about society?
Our RPC discussion moved on to the psychology behind this heightened version of a claimant culture.
Recovering reciprocity
‘Where’s the reciprocity?’ someone asked. Are we becoming a society so focused on our individual rights and claims that we have forgotten that things only work in civil society if we all co-operate?
I have commented before on the language and the expectations we display as voters. Politicians tell us that they will deliver solutions and we lap this language up as if government was the Deliveroo of social and economic problems.
As citizens we demand to be served rather than asking ourselves if we have any responsibility for making democracy work. We become steadily less the citizen and more the consumer as people like Jon Alexander have pointed out.
Has the emphasis on rights in our culture become too strong? Have we perhaps lost the idea that we need to be a contribution society?
Holding AI Companies Accountable for ALL their Externalities
Or have we just given AI the wrong instructions?
Perhaps the creators of large language models are the ones who should impose some restraint upon their models. We have heard much about the externalities created by data centres. Eventually the big AI creators and users will be held accountable for their impacts on communities, Nature, and energy consumption.
Aren’t they equally responsible for bullshit asymmetry – for the production of organisationally damaging waste? Time is precious, and AI is being weaponised to waste time.
Just as Meta/Facebook is at last under some pressure to accept its responsibility to limit the use of its platform for malicious and harmful purposes, perhaps in time Anthropic and Open AI and Google Deep Mind will be made to feel they are accountable for the negative impacts of the waste their products are now spewing out?
Now there’s a new thought for litigators!
Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company, Senior Advisor to Board Intelligence, and co-author with Ong Boon Hwee of Entrusted – Stewardship for Responsible Wealth Creation (World Scientific 2020). The other speakers in the discussion of AI in The Workplace were Professor Catherine Barnard of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Jake Wall of Tech UK, with Ellie Gelder of RPC in the chair. See https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7516127203147837440