No longer having to prove that you're in need of help
In almost any, or dare I say, every single country on the planet that pays out some form of subsidies to people for various reasons, an incredible amount of bureaucracy is needed to be able to receive those subsidies or country-specific benefits.
Now, this is driven by all sorts of factors. One of them being that we as a society very often feel like you should really be in a place where you can prove that you need a particular subsidy so that and only in that case deserve to get it. And so we put the burden on individuals that really need it to prove that they really need it.
Now there’s all sorts of examples of this, one of them being the TANF cash assistance program in the United States, where there’s all sorts of notorious administrative hurdles, including drug tests, educational requirements, benefit time limits and restrictions on cash usage. In other words, even if you are in a place where you should get this, it’s incredibly hard to get it because the administrative burden is so incredibly big, which further takes away from your ability to do other things with your time, like finding work or taking care of yourself because you are a person that needs to be able to do those things.
There’s a particularly egregious case in the Netherlands in the so-called Toeslagenaffaire, the childcare benefits scandal, where at least 35,000 parents of young children were charged with committing fraud on childcare benefits subsidies and were forced to pay back the subsidies that in fact they actually did deserve to get. This caused an incredible amount of pain. You can read more about it in the aptly called investigation of Amnesty International Xenophobic Machines.
Unfortunately, in my very brief exploration of this topic beyond my cursory curiosity, I found so many examples of this that it would be too much to add here. I will leave it up to you to do further investigation. My point here being is that the people that least could use an incredible amount of work in bureaucracy, unfortunately face the very most of it.
Will AI save us here as well?
As an optimist, I believe that this is one of the greatest positive potential effects of AI there could possibly be. Instead of having to manually fill out forms and having to worry about doing so correctly—there’s examples of forms missing a single number or wrongly written number and causing years of drama— AI can take over this work, not just the filling in of documents. Also, the retrieving the correct information, correcting documents, processing them and generally making it easier for everybody involved and faster. AI can take over this work, not just the filling in of documents, also the retrieving the correct information, correcting documents, processing them and generally making it easier for everybody involved and faster to get benefits they deserve.
I’m not optimistic that societies will suddenly become rational and say “hey, you know what? The fraud is probably significantly lower than the additional cost we have on this massive bureaucratic machine. Let’s make things simpler”
And so I’m putting my hope in technology and hope that for the very most vulnerable people in our societies, AI will also make their life a little bit easier and a little bit better.