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People think that there’s nothing to my job, because so much of the processing
goes through the AI, but it’s not 2045, it’s only 2025. The AI makes mistakes,
and its work has to be checked. Obviously, I don’t just duplicate the work
that it completes. It does a deep dive of the candidate’s financial situation,
and comes up with the results. Someone has to read and interpret those
results, and ensure that they match up with the overall impression of the
accounts. If, for instance, the report told me that the candidate was the CEO
of a company, on the board of directors for another organization, and owned
three jets, then concluded that he was entitled to a Class 3-A payout, then I
would know that something went wrong. That’s a gross exaggeration—we don’t run
into those kinds of major technical issues—but that sort of thing is happening
at more plausible scales all the time. Without boring you with all the numbers
and details, the computer sometimes has trouble understanding the whole
picture. Like I said, it’s really complex, but it boils down to looking at two
factors. We calculate a candidate’s income, and we calculate their assets. A
bachelor working at a fast food restaurant might not be making that much
money, but if they still live at home, and have all of their necessities paid
for, their assets might look pretty good. On the flipside, a single mother
supporting six kids—two of which are in college—might be severely struggling
despite raking in six figures. Humans are better at understanding such things
than AIs are, so a Financial Evaluator has to see every case, and make a
reasonable judgment. This typically means making an adjustment up or down a
subclass, but there have been times where we’ve felt that someone was entitled
to a payout, even though they technically appeared to be middle-class. There
was one candidate whose gambling winnings had not yet been paid out, but we
projected that he would secure him, so we decided to assign him a
pay-up. Since he wasn’t very liquid yet, he couldn’t pay right away,
but of course we have payment plans, and he was absolutely happy to do that.
We had to reach out to him before his appointment so we could explain the
assessment to him, and he was actually pretty excited. He was proud to qualify
for pay-up, because not everyone is, and he considered it a great honor to
help support such people. He understood it, because a couple of weeks prior,
he was one of them. That’s why we set up the direct-donation portal, because a
lot of people want to help, even if they’re not getting anything out of it,
and we certainly don’t want to discourage them from doing that. I don’t handle
those funds, but according to my co-worker, the percentage of revenue we
receive to maintain the program is increasingly coming from that source. I
never thought that I would be working for a place like this. Of course, all
charities have donors and recipients, but the way they’ve streamlined it, it’s
the most fiscally elegant system I have ever been a part of. It’s really quite
beautiful, when you see how all the gears turn.
