Nevada has a new helper in its effort to clear its backlog of unemployment claims: Google AI. Gizmodo reports that under the initiative, one of the company’s cloud-based AI models will be tasked with analyzing transcripts of appeal hearings and recommending whether cases should be approved. Welcome to a future where a robot decides whether you’ll get the money you requested from the government.
The Nevada Independent wrote in June that an AI model trained on the state’s unemployment law and policies will analyze transcripts of virtual appeal hearings. It will then render a decision, which state workers will review for errors and decide whether to follow.
This will replace the current process by the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR), which takes an average of three hours for a real person to complete. DETR IT administrator Carl Stanfield told the Nevada Independent that Google’s AI (which uses the company’s Vertex cloud system) can deliver a decision in under five minutes.
“The time savings are tremendous,” Stanfield said. It’s easy to understand why Nevada would be eager to rely on the emerging technology. As recently as June, the state reportedly had a backlog of more than 10,000 unprocessed appeals, about 1,500 of which were left over from the pandemic. And if the tech’s reviews are accurate — or human reviewers catch its mistakes — it could be a huge time saver.
However, there could be psychological pressure on staff reviewing cases to ratify the AI’s findings. “If a robot gave you a recommendation and all you have to do is check a box and there’s pressure to clear the backlog, that’s a little worrisome,” Michele Evermore, former deputy director of unemployment modernization policy at the Department of Labor, told Gizmodo.
Stanfield told Gizmodo that a governance committee will meet weekly while the state fine-tunes the model, and will meet on a quarterly basis to monitor for hallucinations and bias. The stakes could be high for claimants because an AI-powered system could affect their ability to appeal fraudulent decisions.
“In cases that involve questions of fact, the district court cannot substitute its judgment for the judgment of the appeals referee,” Elizabeth Carmona, senior attorney at Nevada Legal Services, told Gizmodo. In other words, if the person reviewing the decision overlooks the AI’s mistakes, the court may not have the legal authority to overturn it.
One Nevada politician put it a little more bluntly. “Are we out of our love minds?” NV State Senator Skip Daly (D-Reno) told the Nevada Independent this summer. “I’m skeptical about the whole concept of overreliance on algorithms and computers. I hope we’ll be cautious about it, and think before we say, ‘We have to be faster or better than the next guy.'”