Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services

"Flooding" implies some nefarious purpose. There's no evidence of that in this paper. Maybe these agents are finally giving people who could never find the time, resources, knowledge, etc. to engage with the system.

"Public services are increasingly becoming more accessible with LLMs" How about that as the title?

They also have zero evidence that this is because of LLMs. They just got some data related to volume, did a really crappy analysis that wouldn't even stand up as an intro to stats course project, and declared their biased opinion as likely true.

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 security systems than it does about LLMs, hopefully prompting our governments to review and start thinking about social security reform.

This is good I think. I have a friend that worked for a Law Firm / NGO / Charity kind of thing, whose primary purpose was writing appeals for benefits to the VA. These were benefits that the person in question was legally entitled to, but required outside legal assistance to actually attain. Regardless of your personal opinion on defense, VA fraud, etc. it would seem good that people who are legally entitled to a benefit are more easily able to attain the benefit.

> 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.

This is a bad thing. It means public services will ultimately deploy AI to respond to those requests, and people will be denied instantly with no recourse or human oversight, it will be tyranny of the machine.