alt Hacker NewsI think this is probably a good thing. It’s not just public services, but any company that consumers have to deal with (in ways they don’t want to). Historically, only those with the most time, money, connections, and education have been able to extract benefits from these systems. E.g., if someone wants to fight an insurance claim being denied, they might need to hire an expensive lawyer or spend hours performing their own research.
What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. Initially, I imagine we’ll start with LLMs on the consumer side debating LLMs on the service side (this is arguably already the case for a few industries). But at some point, unless identical conditions lead to identical outcomes for the people involved, there will be lawsuits. So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
On the one hand, that has the potential to make things much fairer across economic classes. You don’t get special benefits by having upper class resources. On the other hand, it could lead to increasing the actual requirements for certain benefits, which then reduces class mobility by locking in the benefits to those who already have them, with no clever way to wriggle out of your own level.
I’m just kind of thinking out loud. I don’t know what’s to going to happen long-term, but I think it’s important to monitor these changes carefully as they’re occurring.
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TBH, most government bureaucracy is just pure overhead connected to a jobs program.
A competent government, focused on delivering the services that citizens are actually entitled to, not on paying clerks or avoiding career-ending events at all costs, would do most of this digitally. And by digitally, I don't mean "you can fill the form online, maybe with some auto-fill and autocomplete suggestions for addresses", I mean just sending you the transfer if you're eligible, automatically fetching all the info they need to see if that is the case. If there even is a form, that's too much overhead.
Even Estonia (and other tech-forward EU governments) don't do this. Poland is considered pretty good on the digital front, but many digital processes still result in a (digitally-transmitted) form being printed in some obscure processing center and manually processed by a clerk during business hours.
I disagree - this doesn’t make it more accessible for people who don’t have the means, it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy and forces them to do orders of magnitude more work out of a lack of understanding. It’s debatable whether or not these systems are built in good faith to allow benefit claimants to appeal or not, but what will happen here is the appeals process will be clamped down on, hard and heavy.
It’s the equivalent of downloading the entire source code of chrome to access a website. are you entitled to do it? Absolutely. Is it a gigantic pain in the ass for the person who has to serve you the 2GB of source code from their git mirror? Yep
The endgame is that everything will be gated by costly signals. What will remain costly as LLM's automate white-collar work?
One hypothetical outcome of AI-mediated job loss is that more and more people wind up working in the services (private and public) providing human judgement. Is this person qualified to receive that benefit? Are they truly deserving or just trying to game the system? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if over time we see an explosion in the number of benefits adjudicators or victims services personnel or patient advocates.
Maybe there is an economic equalizer, but I feel like Fable is going to win more appeals than GLM 5.2, so perhaps not truly an equalizer. If the LLM you're using to run your appeal is better than the one your insurance company is using to process your appeal, then you have a better chance of winning. So we have an arms race type situation, and money is always good in arms races.
Yeah, this is going to be interesting. First thing I did with the new Instinct bot was have it generate a property tax value appeal for me. Which will almost definitely go through; it's a slam dunk case but I'd been putting it off for an embarrassingly long time. Now it took me 10 minutes on a Sunday. This is obviously good, but I don't know how public agencies are going to deal with the influx of people trying to get the benefits they are owed, now that they can't rely on red tape and busy schedules to decrease the load.
I hope it will force institutions to simplify entitlements. Right now the institutions can pretend like their kafkaesque system is fine because nobody manages to navigate the maze.
> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
We're seeing how this plays out now in various states that have made their benefits systems nearly impossible to use, which helps them save money by not doling out benefits at all. Having helped some of my elder relatives try to apply for social security payments online makes me very, very concerned about how it's going to look when I'm that age.
The cost of an automated bot that will talk you endlessly in circles until you give up is negligible now.
> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. Initially, I imagine we’ll start with LLMs on the consumer side debating LLMs on the service side
More data centers, less low-end lawyers, probably more pressure on the judicial system.
I think people using LLMs the right way is great and will democratize information.
However, most of us have experienced people wasting our time, sending us AI slop. People need to learn how to use the tools properly and respect other people's time.
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> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like.
A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process.
For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as distinct from nominal benefits; any gap between nominal and actual benefits will probably end up smaller).
For publicly-funded things (government benefits), this could show as increased budgets for the same result or decreased results on the same budget.
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> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
Well, maybe standardization of how employers or doctors or whoever are required to report things to the government.