Damiano GerliHow it started (May 25). How it's going (five days later).
alternative_be✅🖖🏻@damianogerli I can’t fathom this. So a helpline actually fires real people, offering real help and replaces them with an ff-ing chatbot? Sorry for the strong language, but this reminds me a former colleague who vented in the early nineties that things would get so bad at social services that clients would have to insert their electronic ID into an ATM machine and the machine would subsequently decide whether they would qualify for benefits or not. We were social workers and live in Belgium, Europe. I am retired now and often wonder whether it will come to that. Although social worker is still a protected title in my country and you have to have at least a bachelor’s degree to be a social worker, #socalWork is not what it used to be. Generally, I have the impression that people are being educated well before entering our field, but once there, there is only so much they can or are allowed to do. Moreover, we experience a shortage of social workers.
Glyph@alternative_be @damianogerli FWIW a simple mechanical ID check would be a huge *upgrade* over the kafkaesque nightmare that we have for benefits in the US. A patchwork network of shitty AIs are already deciding whether you live or die, but you have to fill out a ton of different forms every month for the privilege https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/column-how-algorithms-to-root-out-welfare-fraud-often-punish-the-poor
@glyph @damianogerli Wow! That’s atrocious, to say the least. Over here, people on benefits still have social workers so people can be counselled when/ if needed. Only the counselling part gets less and less attention because of new rules, a more controlling nature of the job (which puts people off when they need to be able to talk freely) and a shortage in staff. So to put things mildly, I don’t like the way we are heading.