Under strAIn: breaking the British state

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1:40Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer.

1:50Rosie Blau:Today on the show, should priests have to report child abuse disclosed in confession? and the trials and tribulations of being a short man.

2:06But first...

2:14Have you ever had the feeling that your interactions with your government were kind of deliberately difficult? That basically it was so complex to appeal a ticket or fine or figure out a tax deduction that fewer people would bother? Hmm, me too. But do you know what's great for explaining and navigating that kind of complexity? Yeah, you do. We all hate having to deal with the bureaucracy of the tax office or the town hall or whatever, and so we are seeing the public are rapidly turning to artificial intelligence to help them navigate their daily interactions with the state. Matthew Holhouse is our public policy editor.

2:51As a result, bureaucracies everywhere are struggling to cope with the new demand that this is putting on them. And so there's something of an arms race, really, between the state and the public in terms of who can adopt artificial intelligence more quickly.

3:10What do you mean by interactions with the state? You're seeing the public adopt AI pretty much anywhere where they have to deal with the state, particularly where it involves lots of form filling or understanding quite complex rules. And one of the characteristics of this is that it tends to crop up in quite unexpected places. So where we're seeing this quite prominently in the UK is in the employment tribunal system. These are courts that deal with disputes between workers and their bosses. We've seen the backlog in employment tribunal cases rise 55 % in a single year. in large part lawyers say due to a big increase in claims have been brought with the help of AI which have made more claims but also made those claims more complex to deal with we're seeing in the planning system filing an objection to a planning complaint is quite hard work they've seen a big increase in people who've used AI to help prepare their objections you're seeing in the benefit system again somewhere where there's lots of form filling quite complex systems for people to understand they're turning to things like chat GPT to help them understand the system, but also how to file the most successful claim possible.

4:15You are seeing it pop up in the most humdrum corners of the state, particularly when there's a bit of money at stake. So parking appeals is something where we are seeing claims pretty much everywhere, actually. People are using AI to help them appeal against a parking ticket that they don't want to pay. You will see it in the UK with the new Renters' Rights Act, which is an act of parliament that allows people to challenge the rent increase that they get from their landlord. So pretty much anywhere you can think of, really, there tends to be applications for this. But as a rule, it's the more complex or boring or difficult bit of bureaucracy you've got to deal with the state, the more likely it is that people turn to AI to help them with it.

4:53But you framed this at the outset as an arms race. The government is responding in turn. Yes. So the question this poses for governments is, does AI in the end prove to be a big productivity booster for governments or does it turn out to be a productivity drag? So the British government, like governments pretty much everywhere, thought that AI could turn out to be a massive productivity booster and they'd get huge savings as a result. Because you think of all the paperwork that goes on. But the question is, does the savings that result from that outweigh the increased cost to the state of a citizenry, which is using AI to maximize their rights, to claim all the entitlements that are due, to challenge the tax bill they don't want?

5:34That's where this arms race dynamic comes in. Is this development good for the citizenry, for the machinery of government? On the face of it, for you and I, this is an absolute godsend because lots of people don't like dealing with bureaucracy. It sometimes seems by design complicated. It's like going through an obstacle course, trying to challenge a parking ticket or get your recycling bin collected or whatever it is you're trying to do. But if the collective response is essentially flooding the state with our AI complaints and what have you, then that's not the business of government either, right?

6:06Exactly. And this is where sort of our short-term individual interests conflicts with our collective long-term interests. So it could risk becoming a bit of a tragedy in the commons because everybody loses out if the state cannot function. And you can see a scenario where everybody is turning to AI or AI agents to deal with their problems with the state. And these 20th century bureaucracy simply weren't signed for that volume of stuff. So for example, we are seeing big weights emerge in the employment tribunal as lots of people bring more cases and they seek specialist provisions which aren't used very much.

6:39You would see in the planning system, the planning system is going to become paralyzed if everybody turns to AI with the welfare system. If you see a big increase in people seeking the benefits to which they're legally entitled, you are going to see the cost of that go up. So you can see a scenario where you get a bit of a doom loop of more people filing complaints, more people seeking appeals with AI, and as a result, actually the system just becoming institutionally less capable and less able to deliver for them because on top of their sort of day job, they're also having to deal with this growth in challenges.

7:14So if the problem here is 20th century bureaucracy running into 21st century AI, how can the bureaucracy change? and fast to not end up seizing up? I think it's really going to require governments to think quite big and think quite imaginatively and rethink some of the systems that have been designed over the past 60 or 70 years or so. So I think the first thing to do is governments really need to stop and pause before they pass legislation that creates new appeal mechanisms or new redress mechanisms. So for example, in the UK, we have a new labour law, the Employment Rights Act, and you law the Renters' Rights Act designed to protect tenants, whatever you think about the merits of those laws, it is a fact that they create big, broad avenues for legal challenge.

7:58The government has not put a lot of thought into how they're going to impact the courts and that the senior judiciary think are really ripe for AI-backed challenge. So before you pass big bills like that, you really need to think, what does it look like if everybody uses AI to exploit them at scale? The second thing that really needs to happen is Governments need to look at this whole mass of procedural rights that have been created over the past 70 years and say, what does it look like if AI interacts with these? If they are Byzantine, if they're complex, if they're really vague and there's lots of human discretion in them, that's going to be really problematic with AI.

8:32So they need to be really short. They need to be very simple. And the grounds for accepting or refusing an appeal, I think, has to be very, very easily interpretable. So easy that AI can have an unambiguous result about whether there's a good appeal there or not. I think governments are going to have to talk about cost. Do you put some friction in the system so that actually before people turn to chat GPT to launch a freedom of information request or bring a tribunal case, they say, well, actually, am I so aggrieved by this or do I care about this so much that I'm willing to pay, for example,£30 to lodge this?

9:04And ultimately, I think, going back to this idea of the arms race, this really is going to be a bit of a burning platform. And I know this is the debate, certainly in the British government, about how do you adopt AI faster in government so that the government becomes more efficient, more able to cope with a sort of AI-equipped public. That's not just about speeding up these old bureaucratic processes, but thinking actually how do we redesign them so we do something better. I know that you've been focusing your lens on Britain, but surely these problems are cropping up elsewhere in the world. Britain is a case study in a phenomena that is cropping up to a greater or lesser extent pretty much everywhere.

9:38So there's an academic called Chris Schmitz. He's got a new paper. He counted 93 examples of this across 11 countries, from Japan to Brazil to Germany, Canada, the United States. You get a diverse range of examples, but they tend to be pretty similar. So privacy regulators are everywhere. Employment tribunals in Australia, like in the UK. And parking tickets is something that you find in pretty much every major city in the world. No one. No one likes a parking ticket. No one likes parking tickets. And this trend, it really is going to accelerate and get really interesting as people turn from AI chatbots that just give you advice to agentic AI, which is able to basically follow simple instructions and carry out a task on your behalf, a sort of butler, if you will.

10:22Bureaucratic butler. A bureaucratic butler, which is not only able to find the rules and interpret it and draft the letter, but basically do it all without asking and then it will launch the appeal on your behalf. Because unlike humans, when agentic AI is dealing with bureaucracies, it will never lose its temper and it will never lose the will to live and it will never give up. Matthew, thanks very much for your time. Thank you.

11:03I grew up in a family that was incredibly religious, very what would be called now traditionalist.

11:11Rebecca Jackson:Peter Isley's childhood was spent in the orbit of the Catholic Church. Rebecca Jackson is our Southern correspondent. Born into a big family in 1960s Wisconsin, fate dealt the Isleys a difficult hand. There were eight in my family. I had seven brothers and sisters. My father died when I was nine months old. I was the youngest with my twin brother. A very tragic car crash. Still, growing up in such a full house brought the siblings together. At home, faith was paramount. My mother raised us all in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the center of our lives. And there was nothing greater you could be than a priest.

11:55Period.

11:57Rebecca Jackson:So Peter went to high school at a seminary run by Capuchin monks. It was there that his story got darker. We had to have a spiritual director. And the director that I was assigned to was a pedophile. So I was sexually assaulted and raped as a child by a Catholic priest. I'm so sorry.

12:23Rebecca Jackson:Once a scandal that consumed public consciousness, child abuse in the Catholic Church has settled into an endemic crisis. The two terms now pair with a grim ease. In America, state governments have grappled with how to improve safety for children. In recent years, more have started requiring priests to be mandated reporters. This spring, a pair of bills tried to take it a step further, reigniting a fierce legal battle. At their heart, the question of whether one religious right could be carved out from the rules. Confession.

13:02Rosie Blau:Becca, fill in a bit of context for me here. What is a mandated reporter? What does that system involve?

13:10Rebecca Jackson:So the idea of mandated reporting is that when it comes to child abuse in America, there are certain adults that are responsible, if they hear something on the job, for reporting it to law enforcement. So the types of people that fall into this category in most states are teachers, doctors, therapists, even camp counsellors. And increasingly, states are adding clergy to that list. How are clergy different from other professions on that list then? As you can imagine, your relationship with your priest or rabbi or imam is going to be different from, say, a child to their camp counselor or a student to their teacher, right?

13:47Rebecca Jackson:People come to clergy for private spiritual guidance. And particularly within the Catholic Church, if you look at confession, that's a place where people certainly don't expect anything to be reported. The confession box within Catholicism is something that is tremendously sacred. And most clergy across the country legally enjoy some form of what is called penitent privilege. And this means that what's said in private conversations between a priest and a parishioner cannot be taken to court. Different states have approached this differently when it comes to mandated reporting. At least six states like New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia have completely overridden any penitent privilege when it comes to child abuse cases, meaning that mandated reporting has to happen regardless of whether the conversation happens in a spiritual context.

14:37Rebecca Jackson:This past legislative session, lawmakers in Missouri and Vermont tried to get their states to do the same. Other states like California and South Carolina thread the needle a little bit more carefully by saying that if a priest is acting as a teacher or if they hear a confession from, say, a perpetrator but not a victim, then they have to report it. So this is a real patchwork of policy across the United States, and there is not currently a consensus about whether confession should be protected or not.

15:05Rosie Blau:And how have priests responded to this demand to speak up?

15:09Rebecca Jackson:The Catholic Church, as you can imagine, is adamantly against this. Under Catholic doctrine, the absolute seal of confession is one of the most important tenets of the religion, and it cannot be broken under any circumstances. One canon lawyer that I spoke to told me that if priests do break the seal of confession, the punishment is severe. They're automatically excommunicated and their case is sent to Rome for disciplinary action. That's as severe a punishment as a priest would face for raping a child. And so this puts clergy in America in a really difficult position because under these laws that do not exempt confession from mandated reporting, they're either going to be violating state law or canon law.

15:51Rosie Blau:Okay, so this definitely doesn't fit with what the Catholic Church wants. How are they fighting the states? What are they arguing?

15:58Rebecca Jackson:So Rosie, a band of powerful lawyers have come to represent the Catholic Church and to argue that this actually violates the First Amendment protection of religious freedom. There was a case last year when Washington State tried to do this, and the lawyers argued that it was such an infringement on a basic religious practice that it wouldn't be allowed by the constitution. Their argument hinged on one particular hypocrisy, which was that lawyers are exempt from reporting, right? So if a client comes to a lawyer and says, you know, I abused a child, then a lawyer does not have to go to the state, does not have to go to law enforcement and report that.

16:35Rebecca Jackson:And so what they said is that under Supreme Court precedent, if it is indeed true that protecting children is so important, then how can you be exempting anyone? So if lawyers are exempt, then surely clergy should be too.

16:48Rosie Blau:Isn't there something else slightly odd here, which is that the historic cases of abuse by members of the Catholic Church against children might include those very priests who are apparently hearing these problems in the confession box?

17:03Rebecca Jackson:That's exactly right. And that's one of the things that I heard again and again from these child safety advocates, is that the Catholic Church is just a different beast here because there has been such a tremendous history of abuse. And importantly, there's also been many cases of abuse happening actually within the confession box itself. So there is a certain hypocrisy to that. The only way to override that First Amendment protection of religious freedom is if the state can prove that it has a compelling interest to do so. The child safety advocacy groups basically say that protecting children from harm is obviously a compelling interest and that that should override any kind of religious doctrine.

17:43Rebecca Jackson:In court, though, that argument has not held up and the religious liberty lawyers seem to have had a slam dunk in Washington and don't really expect this to be legally complicated for them going forward.

17:54Rosie Blau:And where do survivors like Peter, who you spoke to, come down on this?

17:59Rebecca Jackson:So when I spoke to Peter, he definitely thought that this issue is so pervasive that carving out any exceptions is just illogical and will lead to more children being harmed. One of the interesting things that he told me is that confession is actually a place where crimes are often uncovered that would otherwise go undetected, because this is not just about adult perpetrators confessing. You know, the adults are having this argument, and then the seven-year-old is walking in to confession, to confess. You know, we know about this dynamic quite well. The child takes on the guilt, shame, and responsibility for what is occurring, and they don't even, you know, they're children.

18:37Rebecca Jackson:You felt that you had done something wrong. I felt, and he told me this, that I was making him do these things. There's a particular kind of aura around the priest. For kids, they are kind of like God or Jesus.