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Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

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Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#81

Post by JoshTriplett »

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.

In practice, the government spends far more trying to prevent the boogeyman of people who "shouldn't" get benefits receiving them than any actual fraud would ever cost.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#82

Post by Scoundreller »

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.

> It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.

iunno, even when they bother to do means-testing in my jurisdiction, they exclude any slightly illiquid assets, regardless of size.

Have a paid off house (any value), paid off motor vehicle (any value) and a corporate pension plan you can start collecting in X years? No problem! You still qualify for long-term social assistance if your income is low as long as your on-paper deposits/investments are also low.

No vehicle/home/pension but your main asset is your self-funded retirement account? You gotta cash that out first. What could you possibly need that for?

I'd get it in the short-term, but the government seems to make it easiest for itself.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#83

Post by maccard »

edmundsauto wrote: post #74
derektank wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Which is why they get paid, of course. I feel more sympathy to the recipients ts who are eligible for benefits but unable to receive them due to onerous paperwork. AI is an equalizer between the desperate amateur and the bureaucratic professionals who know how to effectively navigate their side of the system. For example, I just hooked an agent up to call my internet company to negotiate a discount. Without that capa…

My wife works in handling large grant applications for government. She works with the applicants through the process and then evaluates the app when it comes in. She guesses that about half of her work comes from 3 or 4 cases which are clear failures on basic criteria, they have been repeatedly told they need to fix those cases and when the decision is made, they appeal it on every single minute point. They are absolutely entitled to do this, but the reality is it’s not going to help someone who doesn’t understand why they’re not getting the funding in the first place place. But because it’s government, the appeal gets treated as though it’s coming from a place of legitimate effort when in the last 12 months it’s a chatGPT phishing expedition.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#84

Post by pjc50 »

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?

Turning up in person. The way to deal with LLM spam will be to force people back to government offices, during the week, 9-5, with ID and bag checks and so on. This is hugely inefficient but the only way to keep out the avalanche of LLM spam.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#85

Post by ben_w »

pjc50 wrote: post #84
atleastoptimal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Turning up in person. The way to deal with LLM spam will be to force people back to government offices, during the week, 9-5, with ID and bag checks and so on. This is hugely inefficient but the only way to keep out the avalanche of LLM spam.

It'll work for now, at least.

I fully expect that in my lifetime someone will offer a service of tissue-culturing just enough to make an inverse-cyborg* to handle all your, ahem, meat-space obligations.

I mean, I'm already following one YouTuber who is doing a small-scale version of this with mouse flesh as a long-running series.

* living flesh covering some amount of compute/robot, rather than a human augmented by machine. I take no position on where this will be on the scale from "everything's organic except the brain which is a microchip powered by blood sugar" to "the only biological component is the skin, everything else is a robot and silicon chips".

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#86

Post by GauntletWizard »

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oun5gvDAU&t=116s

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#87

Post by Tarq0n »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #81
cattenwallen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In practice, the government spends far more trying to prevent the boogeyman of people who "shouldn't" get benefits receiving them than any actual fraud would ever cost. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

It's not really about the dollar amount of fraud, but maintaining public support for benefits schemes. If people feel that benefits aren't going strictly to the intended recipients the sense of fairness that underlies the system is eroded.

There's also the issue that if you don't counter fraud it will accelerate as organized crime jumps on the bandwagon.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#88

Post by Tarq0n »

jrockway wrote: post #9
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…

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.

In regulated industries and government they aren't going to be allowed to process your appeal with just AI, so there's a cost asymmetry there that favors the "ddos"ers.

Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

#89

Post by JoshTriplett »

Tarq0n wrote: post #87
JoshTriplett wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, the government spends far more trying to prevent the boogeyman of people who "shouldn't" get benefits receiving them than any actual fraud would ever cost. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

It's not really about the dollar amount of fraud, but maintaining public support for benefits schemes. If people feel that benefits aren't going strictly to the intended recipients the sense of fairness that underlies the system is eroded. There's also the issue that if you don't counter fraud it will accelerate as organized crime jumps on the bandwagon.

> If people feel that benefits aren't going strictly to the intended recipients the sense of fairness that underlies the system is eroded.

And in an ideal world, you then say "that will literally cost you more money than not doing it", and the argument ends.

In practice, gatekeeping on government programs is primarily pushed for by people who don't think the programs should exist at all. The Venn diagram of the set of people who will withdraw their support for programs without such gatekeeping, and the set of people who mostly don't support such programs in the first place, is close to a circle.

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