Scaling Laws: Is AI a Death Sentence for Civic Institutions? with Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog

Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, spoke with Woodrow Hartzog, the Andrew R. Randall Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Jessica Silbey, Professor of Law and Honorable Frank R. Kenison Distinguished Scholar in Law at Boston University School of Law, about their new paper "How AI Destroys Institutions," which argues that AI systems threaten to erode the civic institutions that organize democratic society.

The conversation covered the sociological concept of institutions and why they differ from organizations; the idea of technological affordances from science and technology studies; how AI undermines human expertise through both accuracy and inaccuracy; the cognitive offloading problem and whether AI-driven skill atrophy differs from past technological transitions; whether AI-generated decisions can satisfy the legitimacy requirements of the rule of law; the role of reason-giving, contestation, and political accountability in legal institutions; the tension between the paper's sweeping diagnosis and its more incremental prescriptions; and the case for bespoke, institution-specific AI tools over general-purpose deployment.