> I kind of flipped out, and was motivated to finish this blog piece, when I saw this: “UK government wants to use AI to cut civil service jobs: Yes, you read that right.” The idea — to have citizen input processed and responded to by an LLM — is hideously toxic and broken; and usefully reveals the kind of thinking that makes morally crippled leaders all across our system love this technology.
As someone who actually had to deal with the government recently in the US I disagree. It was impossible to reach a human or otherwise get an answer to my likely not too unusual question. If they had an even half decent LLM then I'd have probably had my answer and action items for me to do within 30 seconds. Instead I've wasted days in various attempts to get some type of answer.
I recently needed to fix some issues in something I filled with the government. Email support used to exist but probably cut due to budgets. Chat support used to exist but probably cut due to budgets. Phone support has no waiting queue and require 1 minute of entering numbers to hit the disconnect point (due to not available agents). Physical mail seems an option but I don't know the format or address. Etc.
As someone who actually had to deal with the government recently in the US I disagree. It was impossible to reach a human or otherwise get an answer to my likely not too unusual question. If they had an even half decent LLM then I'd have probably had my answer and action items for me to do within 30 seconds. Instead I've wasted days in various attempts to get some type of answer.
I recently needed to fix some issues in something I filled with the government. Email support used to exist but probably cut due to budgets. Chat support used to exist but probably cut due to budgets. Phone support has no waiting queue and require 1 minute of entering numbers to hit the disconnect point (due to not available agents). Physical mail seems an option but I don't know the format or address. Etc.