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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-a-net-gain-or-a-net-drain? dept.

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,1 reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

(Emphasis in original retained.)

At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:11AM (6 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:11AM (#532764) Journal

    Seems to me we could task an AI with the entirety of the legal system, and get vastly better justice out of it.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Thursday June 29 2017, @03:16AM (5 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 29 2017, @03:16AM (#532785) Journal

    Many functions of the legal system can indeed be automated, even without true AI but the core must and will, remain human-centered.

    I’m an engineer by training and vocation, but I happen also to be a lawyer, so I can see the two sides of the fence :-)

    The concept of mens rea [wikipedia.org] is the core of the criminal justice system and very difficult to automate. Even with a human jury, it is difficult to clearly demonstrate the intent of someone when performing a criminal act.

    As an example, you’re at a party and after a few drinks you push someone, that someone falls, strikes his/her head on the corner of a piece of furniture and dies.

    You are a murderer, the law makes that perfectly clear, but what penalty should be given to you? If your intention was to harm that person, you get first-degree murder; if you and him/her were horseplaying, you get manslaughter, even if you were not horseplaying, you can allege that it was a friendly push, not meant to harm anyone.

    Take the case of Philando Castile [wikipedia.org], probably you’ve seen the video. To me, the police officer is guilty as hell, but he convinced a jury that he was afraid for his life and he walked away, literally, with murder.

    How AI would know about your intentions or the fear the police officer said he felt? I don't see that happening anytime soon, unless we really write new laws and trash centuries of precedent.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:35AM (#532909)

      Concept of mens rea is bringing thought crime into real crime and diluting the concept of responsibility.

      You should have known better then to drink or to push people around in a room with hard protrusions.

      If you are afraid for your life, you have to make a tough decision, a bargain of your life or your life in prison, and it is your decision. Don't ask the judges to overturn your decision after the bargain was already made. If you were afraid of dying, you should be content that you stayed alive, even for a long while under lock and key.

      I know why you need mens rea, because you want to get back to really evil, nasty, sadistic characters by punishing them for taking joy in crime. I understand that, but it is wrong, because mens rea is exactly what gives them an evasion route. If you hate them and what they represent that much, make a responsible decision and off them from their lives. In the legal system of fixed punishments, you would know the exact price (see above). Someone with a sense of duty toward society, or just appalled enough, would knowingly and willingly sacrifice some of their freedom for betterment of all. The fact that there exist people who would, should keep sociopaths from getting too far.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:07PM (3 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:07PM (#532933) Journal

      You are a murderer, the law makes that perfectly clear, but what penalty should be given to you? If your intention was to harm that person, you get first-degree murder; if you and him/her were horseplaying, you get manslaughter, even if you were not horseplaying, you can allege that it was a friendly push, not meant to harm anyone.

      As your subsequent sentences demonstrated, no the law doesn't make that perfectly clear.

      • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)

        by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:30PM (#533075) Journal

        The law if perfectly clear: the act of killing someone is murder. That describes the action. Then the penalties associated to how the action was performed: was it self-defense? Walk away free. Was is accidental? It is manslaughter. Was it intentional? Yes, then sub-clause, was it premeditated? The penalty you get depends on how the act was committed.

        If you can’t understand such a simple and clear arrangement, you make my point that AI is far from being able to run the legal system.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:38PM (1 child)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:38PM (#533109) Journal

          the act of killing someone is murder

          No, it's not. Not even intentionally killing someone. You need more such as the mentioned mens rea or aggravating circumstances such as while committing a felony.

          If you can’t understand such a simple and clear arrangement, you make my point that AI is far from being able to run the legal system.

          I'm not misunderstanding anything. Murder is more than just killing someone.

          As to running the legal system, there's already several ways that humans are integral to the system, particularly a jury of peers. But the rest doesn't require humans. I don't feel the urge to automate the process since it works well enough and automated processes can be vastly less efficient in ways that human counterparts can't match.

          • (Score: 1) by jelizondo on Friday June 30 2017, @10:26PM

            by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 30 2017, @10:26PM (#533739) Journal

            You are correct, the word I should have used is homicide, not murder.

            I normally avoid technical terms (such as homicide) that might not be familiar to people in the group or have a subtle meaning, thus with lawyers I won’t bring up the Fresnel Zone and call it simply line of sight and with engineers or other technical people I would use murder instead of homicide.

            Cheers