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Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

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Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#51

Post by arionhardison »

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…

This is something I have been working on. One of the main issues my users have run into is navigation. The Gov. websites often are not very user friendly; so its hard and time consuming to navigate to and apply for the correct services. To address this I have users just speak on their "Intent" for example: "I need help with housing and food assistance, my kid has a peanut allergy and I just lost my job so I don't know what to do."

Note: This is a real request

What happens here it a custom program is created, the program has a protocol that shows exactly how the agent navigates the Gov. system and applies for the benefits. Standard modules are applied to actually do the real work of applying, followups etc...

Despite having a lot of professional experience I have not been able to even get a follow-up interview for a job so I am just pouring my efforts into this.

I have been able to help people get housed, apply for benefits, get into shelters and most recently I started working on erpo.law to speed up and reduce the paperwork on all sides for red flag laws.

Lots of the people that have helped me have done so under the table and not at the approval of their agency heads.

Here is a short vid showing a request that locates an existing program, programs can be codified into re-useable units for people w/ common needs or created in real time... Staffed via O*NET roles that hit real providers I minded from other websites.

Video: https://youtu.be/JOjG71i2F5E

Note: This one matters to me a lot because my mom was in and out of mental institutions my whole life and I been committed before so I really like helping that population because I get it more than most do.

Im also doing city agencies NYC, Boston, Miami, LA, and Vegas to start because they all have their own tld so its easier for me to filter out the bs traffic and bots and stuff.

In terms of scaling human effort the HITL for each module/protocol-chain step can be delegated where needed and the program will persist that prefrence etc...

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#52

Post by willmarch »

nonethewiser wrote: post #44
pixl97 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. O…

>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. You should worry more about your parents whose benefits are jeopardized by stress to the benefits system.

Is there any evidence that this is actually a real worry?

Don’t audits usually find that vast majority of benefits are valid and correctly applied?

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#53

Post by atleastoptimal »

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…

The endgame is that everything will be gated by costly signals. What will remain costly as LLM's automate white-collar work?

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#54

Post by ctoth »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #53
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…

The endgame is that everything will be gated by costly signals. What will remain costly as LLM's automate white-collar work?

Status, mostly.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#55

Post by jiaosdjf »

Of all the sci-fi things Star Trek predicted, the one that hits hardest is whenever Kirk/Pickard have to have some logical debate with a computer to convince it not to destroy them.

This is the real future, theres no way public services will review every request in the future, everything will be you debating a computer, or you asking your computer to debate their computer.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#56

Post by csense »

A complex application process is basically a proof-of-human-work to rate-limit processing costs (for all applications, successful or not) and benefits cost (for successful applications).

In 2026, you can ask an LLM to fill out the application, reducing the expensive proof-of-human-work to a free or cheap machine proof-of-work.

I can immediately think of three different user stories for LLM-generated applications for, without loss of generality, government benefits:

- Alice is honest and likely eligible but didn't apply because the application process was too time-consuming / complex. With LLM assistance, Alice can now complete the process.

- Bob is honest and likely ineligible but didn't apply because he realized he's probably not eligible. With LLM assistance, Bob can now apply anyway -- "Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks."

- Eve is dishonest and ineligible. Eve wants to make money by lying on her application to defraud the government into paying her benefits. With LLM assistance, Eve can more easily make more convincing applications to more agencies.

An interesting question that doesn't seem to be addressed by the paper is how much of the cost is driven by Alice vs. Bob vs. Eve. We can tell very different stories depending on which is the case:

- Mostly Alice: Our current taxes / budget / etc. can only pay for half of what it would cost to pay everyone entitled to benefits under the law. We quietly disenfranchise citizens of their legal right to receive benefits with a bureaucratic process that half of eligible applicants can't complete, but whoops! now a lot more people can complete it with LLM assistance and we're approving most of them because they're legitimately completing the application process and legitimately entitled to benefits. Financially it's killing us to pay what the government promised to all those people to whom it was promised.

- Mostly Bob: A lot more people are applying because LLM's make it super easy for anyone to apply. We don't approve many more applications than we did before -- but each year has about 1,000,000 more applications and 990,000 more denials than the previous year for three years running. Financially it's killing us to pay the processing costs for all those unsuccessful applications.

- Mostly Eve: We're seeing an uptick in applications that are immediately denied, or approved but later revoked, because of fraud. LLM's are making it easier for criminals to defraud the government. Financially it's killing us because we pay those fraudulent benefits before we know they're fraudulent; recovery of funds is slow and uncertain once the fraud is discovered; and fraud imposes additional costs of investigation, prosecution, and punishment.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#57

Post by potatoking »

tbrownaw wrote: post #31
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…

Sure but is that the end game? Systems can respond with things like higher deductible insurance options and graduated assistance based on tax filing which may benefit people who wouldn't file before and also won't use AI for this but were already paying costs of others getting more benefits.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#58

Post by sbrother »

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…

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.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#59

Post by jwlake »

cattenwallen wrote: post #48
miki123211 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

In my understanding when it comes to doling out benefits, it's not an overhead connected to a jobs program. The less eligible people use benefits, the less the government has to pay out benefits. It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.

One could argue that by making benefits hard to access, you under-provision and over-reward. This makes fraud more lucrative getting you into a viscous cycle. Normal people less likely to use benefits and dedicated fraudsters more likely.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#60

Post by derektank »

pixl97 wrote: post #28
maccard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy Huh, the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy. The senders are the one that has to navigate said bureaucracy. So, the entire thing is a wash. The systems are complex and confusing, many of them likely by design. Getting an appointment in some of them can take months. Knowing what you actually need can be daunting as quite often there is a byzantine set of requirements tha…

>the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy

As someone that has worked in a bureaucracy, yes, bureaucrats are themselves victims of bureaucracy. One could even say the primary victims, if you’re going by total exposure time.

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