It seems like Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword that is being used everywhere these days. Sometimes AI technology is able to produce some pretty incredible results, and other times it fails completely.
The government of Nevada seems to have enough confidence in the technology to commission a new AI system that will be used to evaluate unemployment applications and determine which are approved and which are denied.
Christopher Sewell is the director of Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation Agency (DETR), and recently talked about this new system during an interview with Gizmodo.
He was careful to explain that this new system will not make any final decisions without human involvement, saying:
“There’s no AI [written decisions] that are going out without having human interaction and that human review. We can get decisions out quicker so that it actually helps the claimant.”
The program was created by Google at the cost of about a million dollars from Nevada taxpayers.
While the idea that this could help process applications faster is certainly attractive, there are some in the state who are worried that it will end up causing more problems than it solves.
Morgan Shah is the director of community engagement for Nevada Legal Services and recently said:
“The time savings they’re looking for only happens if the review is very cursory. If someone is reviewing something thoroughly and properly, they’re really not saving that much time.”
Another worry is that when the humans who are supposed to be reviewing the work done by AI are instructed to work on clearing out a backlog of applications, the temptation will be there to simply agree with the AI program rather than giving each application the attention it needs.
Of course, people often doubt new technologies only to find that they are able to perform better than expected. Hopefully, that is the case here.
If AI is able to accurately review these applications, it will be a good thing for everyone.
If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.