Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

> 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.

With all that said, what makes you hope any government LLM will escape the whims of budget cuts? I'd rather walk in and wait for hours than share a 500 token/sec chatbot with thousands of other users and never get a resolution.

The only thing I've seen that even gets close to working is physically going to the office in person but hell finding what or where that is.

And you can't even do that with Social Security anymore.

If it is something you could be legally liable for, I'd at least send a certified letter to whatever address you can find, so that if it becomes a problem later you can at least show you tried.

> The only thing I've seen that even gets close to working is physically going to the office in person but hell finding what or where that is.

They do try to discourage it sometimes. The local passport office has a sign on the door that says "by appointment only." The first thing you hear upon walking in is "if you don't have an appointment get into line B." If you have an urgent mater they will take care of it without an appointment. I wonder how many people turned around upon seeing that sign on the door. Dark patterns left and right to make it harder to get anywhere.

In the USA, writing a letter to your elected representative (of the appropriate government level, so Senator or Representative for federal, etc) can often eventually get satisfaction, because the government bureaucrats never ignore a letter from them, because it gets their boss yelled at.

And if the LLM cannot solve the case, maybe it can prepare a well-structured ticket that a hoomin can handle quickly & efficiently, without waiting for users to um and aw and gripe and forget things and have to look things up.

Exactly!

I doubt solving people's problems is even 10% of the time government customer service spends talking to people. Letting them spend 50% actually solving people's problems would improve everyone's lives.

Consider a situation where the human operators only get the problems the LLMs can't solve. If LLMs are good but still limited, then the leftover cases will be those that are unusual, difficult, or downright impossible. Think of things like complicated fraud resolution, or the customer needing to change a piece of data on their profile that the engineers never considered could be changed.

If the switch to LLMs is largely a cost-cutting measure for organizations, I could see that the human operators—though downsized—would continue to receive the same compensation as before. In short, they will be paid the same to do more and harder work. If their performance metrics are based on how quickly they can close a case, these cases will never receive the amount of effort they need to get properly resolved. That is bad for the customer, who can't get a strange but pressing problem solved, and it is bad for the employee, who has to work harder at the same rate as before. The only person who comes out ahead is the capital owners.

I've sat with help-line operators for a medium-sized consumer tech company. It seems like 80% of their time is spent troubleshooting very niche issues, with the simple ones sprinkled in for levity. People need wins in order to feel good about their jobs. If it's all difficult problems—at bad pay, then that's just torture.

What about when the LLM inevitably hallucinates a plausible but incorrect answer?

To be fair, a friend I know ran into a string of similar issues when attempting to get her gender changed on her license and passport. The entire system was rife with incorrect advice from workers and broken documentation, which caused several attempts to be rejected (wasting months of time).

The bigger problem with LLMs as they currently stand is that one can easily bully them into breaking outside their normal operation parameters.

this idea is at odds with the way public services work in societies with safety nets.

it has been, and remains to be, the case that the main purpose of certain parts of public services is to give people employment. there is rarely any meritocracy at scale once you get the job.

the reason why we get poor service cannot be completely put down to getting understaffed or lack of budget. while the UK govt has a better public service experience online than many developed countries, this approach I feel is missing the forest for the trees.

>> purpose of certain parts of public services is to give people employment

That does not sound right. This could be partially true in old days (here in Poland during communists rule) but nowadays all public service has stated purpose that has nothing to do with employment. The purpose can be total b*s of course but almost always has nothing to do with just providing jobs.

Everything I hear about public service in both the US and the UK is that it's understaffed to the point where actual people needing those services are greatly impacted. Mainly due to ongoing budget cuts that long predate AI.

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