NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to Kevin De Liban, attorney and founder of TechTonic Justice, about how AI comes between Americans and their government.
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KEVIN DE LIBAN: I had several disabled and elderly clients who were part of a Medicaid program that would provide in-home caregiving assistance that folks needed to live independently and stay out of nursing facilities. And these were folks with severe conditions - quadriplegia, advanced multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, things that don’t get better. And suddenly, the state decided to cut their care drastically - by 50% in some cases - dropping people from, say, eight hours a day of care to four or five. And this meant incredible suffering. People were lying in their own waste. They were getting bed sores from not being turned. They were being shut in. And what we found out is that the state had implemented an algorithmic decision-making system to decide how much care people actually needed, and that choice was what was propelling the cuts.
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INSKEEP: So what do you think about when you bring this past experience to the news of recent weeks, as the Department of Government Efficiency - or DOGE - has been rummaging around in federal computer databases?
DE LIBAN: Well, I understand that most of the time when AI is being used for governmental purposes, it means that the public is likely to be harmed. I just haven’t seen any instance where AI was implemented for governmental functions where that wasn’t the case.
INSKEEP: What do you mean?
DE LIBAN: So every time government uses AI, whether it’s for public benefits administration, people get cut. Whether it’s to reduce staff or increase efficiency, what ends up happening is services are harder to access, longer wait times, more frustration getting accurate information. So AI use in government generally hasn’t worked well, particularly when there are no regulations or safeguards to ensure that this stuff isn’t used for harmful ends. And in the case of DOGE, it’s actively being weaponized to target President Trump’s enemies, you know, diversity efforts, science, journalism, people who are transgender, civil rights.