Nothing good is coming from the artificial intelligence boom (other than a few funny pictures of Ronald Reagan or fictional stories about Harry Styles farting). People are paying higher utility bills, losing their jobs, and having their family farms confiscated just so AI can be used against them.
Now the Department of Veterans Affairs wants to use AI to scan millions of disability claims by wounded military veterans for "signs" of "fraud", and use these AI-generated suspicions to make them take a new medical exam and relitigate their claim. Some of these claims date back over 15 years. Any veteran who is currently receiving benefits and is flagged by AI will have to take a whole new exam and resubmit their claim from scratch.
Whoever is behind this plan isn't very patriotic. If they don't appreciate the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women, they should leave the country and move somewhere like China. Only fools who live in the past would relitigate 15-year-old disability claims like this.
The Social Security disability system has been gutted almost as badly. Recently, the Social Security Administration boasted that the agency significantly reduced the backlog in disability claims. But it turns out that this was probably accounted for almost entirely by rejecting claims, as the already-low rate of approval dropped by several percentage points during that timeframe. Plus, according to a leading disability attorney, the goal of the SSA is to start using AI to review every active disability case every single year.
Meanwhile, the VA is openly opposing a bill that would require the agency to notify veterans if they're targeted by the new AI effort and stop their benefits from being cut off unless a court convicts them of fraud.
Why are wounded vets being targeted now? Much of it appears to be because the Washington Post ran a piece accusing disabled vets of "swamping" the VA with fraudulent claims. There was no basis whatsoever for the accusation, and the article was full of debunked anecdotes. The piece also made light of veterans suffering from hemorrhoids and likened a very painful skin condition to mere acne. The Economist ran a similar screed attacking American war vets and assailed veterans' benefits for growing the national debt. How about not having so many wars? Wars grow the national debt more than anything else does. At the same time, the media is staunchly pro-war: The Washington Post recently said that opposition to the illegal war in Iran is anti-Semitic. The press is pro-war but anti-vet.
America languishes under a hostile punditocracy and bureaucracy that lives in the past and acts with malign intent.
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