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Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

arxiv.org

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Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#31

Post by tbrownaw »

Xcelerate wrote: post #7

I 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 th…

> 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.

.

> 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.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#32

Post by nonethewiser »

jbirnick wrote: post #3

I don't understand why this is often portrayed negatively. In general it's important that people can defend their rights, and I find it great that LLMs can help a lot with that. One could introduce page/word/character limits, and note that the other side can use LLMs too to summarize/organize/extract. Overall I think it's great that LLMs now help me to understand and rightfully claim things from insurances, companies…

>I don't understand why this is often portrayed negatively. In general it's important that people can defend their rights, and I find it great that LLMs can help a lot with that.

Well I thought it was self evident. It’s portrayed negatively because it causes a denial of service. You should view this positively if you want worse access to public benefits.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#33

Post by miki123211 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #7

I 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 th…

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.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#34

Post by nonethewiser »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #5
jbirnick wrote: post #3

I don't understand why this is often portrayed negatively. In general it's important that people can defend their rights, and I find it great that LLMs can help a lot with that. One could introduce page/word/character limits, and note that the other side can use LLMs too to summarize/organize/extract. Overall I think it's great that LLMs now help me to understand and rightfully claim things from insurances, companies…

LLMs are a magic machine to turn commons into tragedies.

Great quote.

Good luck trying to get your book published.

Or run an open source repo from community contributions.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#37

Post by Palomides »

AlexandrB wrote: post #25
lensecat wrote: post #13

In my view there are three takeaways from this, all of which are correct: 1. Already strained government services need to bear increasing input, affecting waiting times and employee workloads, which is bad. 2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good. 3.This phenomenon says more about the complexity of our social securi…

You forgot: 2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to. The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump t…

is that actually happenng?

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#38

Post by nonethewiser »

Paedor wrote: post #12

It's becoming obvious that essentially every public-facing organization needs to change. Short story, poetry, essay submissions, comments, reviews, conference paper and journal submissions, polling, job apps, etc. At this point, I think it's an open question whether there's a scalable way to filter for human effort, that isn't just another layer of AI (e.g. Pangram). I'd love to see something practical come out of th…

Seems plainly obvious to me as well

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#39

Post by pixl97 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #25
lensecat wrote: post #13

In my view there are three takeaways from this, all of which are correct: 1. Already strained government services need to bear increasing input, affecting waiting times and employee workloads, which is bad. 2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good. 3.This phenomenon says more about the complexity of our social securi…

You forgot: 2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to. The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump t…

Having older parents and watching what my grandparents went thru long before LLMs I just don't worry about the poor old state that much.

The political zeitgeist is to always blame the "bad people", the "welfare queens" and the "undeserving" as the problem with the system. But never the complex system that's seemingly designed to benefit things like corporations extracting as much wealth from the system as they can. Or politicians ear marking the money for things they want to do, rather than the people that put the money in the system.

So, yea, your reasoning just really doesn't hit me in the heartstrings at all.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#40

Post by pixl97 »

Palomides wrote: post #37
AlexandrB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot: 2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to. The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump t…

is that actually happenng?

"No, but we're reporting it is" --southpark
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