After the launch of the GPT-4o Chat, Berkeley professor Barry Schwarz’s book on the Paradox of Freedom of Choice is still valid in the legal field. Two decades after the publication of this research, Google CEO Sundar Pichar, who has been at the head of that company for the same amount of time, reveals that the growing implementation of artificial intelligence in its platforms generates progressively more options to decide, which are imported from its different platforms and content sources.
In other words, Google with Chat GPT solves any enigma by proposing countless link options, cataloged by priorities designed and acquired without recurrence, applying artificial intelligence. It employs “transformers” or neurological networks with multiple and iterative attention that simultaneously understand translations, language models and tokenization of words, interpretations of living images, interconnected communication mechanisms and organized systems of response possibilities. Associated, the different transformers develop a scheme for determining the will to make decisions, offering numerous options but obviously without carrying the final responsibility of adopting any. Faced with our uncertainty of choosing, the digital world has already artificially made available any way of life we choose.
Options or freedom? Schwarz maintains in his paradox that the greater the possibility of choice, the more individuals we expose ourselves to a paralysis of our freedom to decide. On the contrary, given a smaller number of options, individuals feel greater satisfaction when exercising it. The explosion of consumer options increased our ability to choose about almost all the definitions of life that guide us, such as sexual identity, political preferences, the environment, forms of communication, education, work, to name just a few. some. But unfortunately, this increase in choice options, as proposed by artificial intelligence, is not reflected in greater freedom of decision. It generates a paradoxical paralysis in the face of so many options, disrupting the old maxim that the greater the options, the greater the freedom. Nor do we choose between our own options, but the freedom to choose is exercised through the offering of a number of artificially conceived and apparently reliable options.
What would the lawyer do in the client’s place? In our practice, lawyers no longer advise our clients what they should do, but rather we represent their legal options with the risks of each one, so that they can finally choose. And we add intelligent legaltech services to those options to probabilistically calculate the client’s chances of happening. It seems fairer this way, but clients always ask us what we would do in their place and we tell them that we are not or cannot be in our clients’ shoes. We argue that ethically, it is not our place to occupy their position.
This type of relationship between attorney-client was consolidated over the last two decades, after the explosion of consumer options. Before it did not exist and we lawyers punctually recommended what our clients should choose. Without a doubt, clients felt greater satisfaction and protection then than now.
Update of the law? In the same way that other law schools, whether undergraduate or graduate, teach common or civil law, they offer us a very diversified selection of courses, explained by a professional need to specialize. These courses are presented as exotic jewels of legal specialization. And their teachers are simply ranked according to the consumption of those courses, based on their success with the new subject they teach and the number of students who enroll.
The regulatory specialties offer the law student a topic for a practice dedicated to very sophisticated areas. They point out that the more original, the more attractive the niche in the professional market. The traditional branches of law are questioned and designed based on this ultra-diversified process of law, recognizing involved regulatory ramifications with new subjects. Unfortunately, these courses do not necessarily provide an increase in the freedom to choose about the possibilities of legal science but only options for consuming law for students.
Legislator’s prejudices. Legislators update and manipulate the freedom of choice of individuals, also using quantities of options. They impose the right to housing above the right to property, various socio-labor equalities over individualism and self-employment, they prefer a coercive administration of commerce to the volatility and risks of competition, environmental protection to correct industrialism, the social and ecological sustainability of finances on the profitability of retirement pensions, among other regulatory sophistications. They justify each regulatory proposal as “socially obligatory and non-discriminatory options” determining how and when each one should be chosen.
Thus, costly administrative control structures are instituted, supported by regulations that quickly become intrusive of the freedom to choose. In the richest societies, ethical or moral faults are established in legal relationships, such as ESG and/or anti-ESG; or controls on creativity, some disruptive industry such as fintech or cannabis, for example. Regulatory excesses arise, socially explained, in some statistics or artificially conceived options. To guarantee regulatory fairness, artificial intelligence transformers do not escape this control. Less developed countries import these regulations as part of a global alignment reaction to consumer choice as a legal synonym for social well-being.
Regulatory excess takes advantage of the paralysis of individuals generated by the explosion of consumer options. It imposes a coercive choice based on rules that appear to be specific, but are often legislated by institutions or agencies beyond their original competence, applying artificial intelligence in some way.
Balance of options for freedom. Schwartz explains that the richest societies spend fortunes uselessly to create consumer choice options and that they only generate dissatisfaction when deciding. Studies on the most basic consumer options recommend a maximum of seven or eight alternatives so as not to paralyze consumers.
Impoverished societies, on the other hand, must adjust their priorities to guarantee running water, daily food, efficient health, and transportation safety for their populations, which increases their ambition to simplify and import these options by reproducing globally known alternatives. They distract societies from their own choices.
They are all interested in measuring the impact of artificial intelligence on elections because it supposedly makes political options transparent. On May 6, the federal government of Canada presented the controversial Bill C-70 to Parliament “Foreign influence Act”, to create a registry for foreign entities providing digital information to influence the government. In defense of democracy and in the face of the expansion of artificial intelligence, the project introduces new judicial techniques for international investigation.
Vices of overregulation in the autonomy of the will. The consumerist idea of creating too many options diversifies and reproduces regulatory power in such a way that the possibilities of efficiently controlling its excesses are dispersed. It also causes in the generations most exposed to digital consumption, permanent indecision and the endless search for more options that acts as a substitute solution to the freedom to decide.
This exploration is built with the legislator’s prejudiced regulations. Justified in the countless options of digitalized life, with a predetermined moral richness, these regulations do not represent our power of choice within our society. They are mere artificial and globalized legislative recreations of a duty to be based on the most common individual preferences. Artificial consumer profiles are regulated as if they were real social behaviors to determine behaviors, defining who we should be and how we should decide. They make us feel good and morally approved if we get the options and consume them according to these norms just for the sake of global conformity. The autonomy of the will depends today on the raising of options generated with artificial intelligence and dimensioned regulatoryally.
Artificial intelligence with a repressive effect? Artificial intelligence identifies choice options, often acting beyond our level of consciousness, inventing profiles of individuals that are not real but that function as social parameters to establish new regulations. This generates a repressive power that is used both to regulate various activities and to question the legal effects of artificial intelligence.
These regulations based on artificial information divert our individual power of choice and obstruct access to a better quality of life. They only allow us to compare ourselves in society with others, because we have to consume them, opening a social debate that sounds moral, cultural and productive, but that does not yield us an individual and concrete benefit. With social and political aspirations, a digitally globalized artificial image of individual well-being is manufactured.
Sophisticated social media surveillance systems detect dissent and create behavioral profiles that allow very specific behaviors to be investigated and regulated. Artificial intelligence allows governments to conduct a subtle and precise form of regulation and censorship. With artificial calculations and options, the most unusual nooks and crannies of life in the digital society are regulated back and forth without respecting the individual and unique capital of freedom of choice.
The diversification and proliferation of these regulations denote a dangerous form of overregulation and its vices cause an effective loss of freedom of choice for individuals who are exposed to facing a questionable coexistence within a globally communicated society. They are rules that seek to weaken us as individuals capable of choosing freely, of finding our own options without allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed with artificial creations.
