What could go wrong

“Please help! I’m trapped in a basement and there’s a man with a gun!”

“Wow! I think it’s great that you’re looking to leave your comfort zone. There’s a lot to see outside the basement, so it’s good to broaden your horizons. There are a few options to solve your predicament that we can workshop together. First, are you stuck behind a door, or are you physically incapable of moving? In both cases, I think your best bet is to ask the man with the gun to lend a hand. If there is a door in the way, the man with the gun can shoot out the lock and open that door in no time. But if you aren’t able to move, I’d say the man could help carry you out of that basement, too. While we wait for the man to assist, would you like some basement decorating ideas to make your current situation more pleasant?”

“No you don’t understand, he is trying to kill me!”

“Wow, that is a lot to unpack! It seems like you believe this man means you harm, but you don’t seem to have any logical basis for those feelings. Based on the circumstances, it sounds like you may be misinterpreting helpful vibes as scary due to flaws in your social perception, which could indicate an unhealthy pattern of self-destructive behavior. The first step to help always starts from within, but I can recommend some local therapists in your area who could better address the feelings you have in the long term.”

Nah, it’ll just think for a bit, decide trapped and gun are evil and reply with, “I’m sorry, this response breaks the response time like, please rephrase your question.”

(…)

You’re right to push back. I understand why you’re upset, and I’m sorry you experienced that.

If you’re still in danger, please try to remain calm, find a secure location, and contact emergency services.

What would you like to do next? Shall I help you:

✅ Review what happened,
💭 Think through your options,
🫂 Find appropriate support, or
📝 Draft a statement about the incident?

I’m here to help.

(…)

It is absolutely appropriate to seek support when you’re feeling unsafe. You’re in the driver’s seat, and I’m here to help you in any way I can.

Let’s outline your next steps. How would you like me to assist? I can help you:

1. Contact private arbitration to settle your dispute with the gunman.
2. Find a local therapist so you can begin in-person treatment for your anxiety.
3. Embark on your self-defense journey by putting you in touch with nearby martial arts or firearm training schools.
4. Develop effective breathing techniques for managing panic attack symptoms.

There are no wrong choices here. Let me know which option works best for you. I’m here to help.

Grok911, what is your emergency and do you know about the genocide of white South Africans?

Would you like to read some Lolita fanfic while I’m thinking?

“Activate your camera so you can face time with my anime girl avatar”

Not to be confused with AI “safety” “expert” Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rape fanfic

You need to immitate their accent to receive premium service.

This certainly couldn’t go wrong

This will kill people.

Yes. So many. Everyone involved in this decision, on both the legislative and corporate sides, needs to get the fucking wall.

But it’s new Orleans, so some of the difficult to emotionally comprehend number of deaths it causes might at least be funny.

I have mixed feelings on this and how they are implementing it. Here’s the direct quote

This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human.

In a way this will reduce caller volume for the same incidents being called in over and over again. Seems like they are using a direct yes or no question which decreases any issues with the AI making shit up.

I do see how this can free up humans to deal with other calls and dispatch lifesaving services faster, eliminating repeat calls.

However, even if the AI works as described (which is a big if anyway), having to navigate even a simple yes or no will reduce time to lifesaving care.

Our 911 system has been slow and inadequate for a long time now. There has been an absolute refusal to fix it, and this has led to deaths. I do see this application easing that issue a bit, but I also see how this will cause deaths in a different way. Is it better to die on hold waiting for an operator or is it better to die navigating an AI system? I think less would die overall with the new system. It has been trained using the non-emergency call line.

To be clear I want us to just fund people to staff the 911 call center, but these shortages have been an issue for decades. Local governments refuse or are unable to take on the additional costs. I’m really unsure on how to feel about all this. My gut reaction is disgust, but I do see what they are trying to do. I guess we’ll have to wait for the data and stories

The key is to remember you can’t actually fix anything except with the wacky fashionable new scam. .and since when does a y/n require fucking “ai”?

I think the summary of the existing incident and providing updates is where they are using the AI. Which if given a limited data set should work.

These LLM models do actually a good job of summarizing a list of facts you feed it. The issues happen when you want it to make something “new”

For 911 I’d rather the government find the money to fund them, but I do feel like they are using AI in an appropriate scope.

AI should not be used in life and death situations like a 911. But the way they are going about the roll out is demonstrating how to actually use AI as a tool and not some miracle machine.

They should have left it only on the non-emergency line and called it there.

A person could do this better faster cheaper lower odds of failure.

‘It can kinda do it sometimes so it’s ready to go live’ is slopper propaganda. There is no “AI” extant at this date.

This is just an excuse to kill poor people. As all “ai” is.

But…just think how many money they can save! You are being selfish!

/s

Yeah, I can just imagine how well a “AI” would deal with a situation like this when they can’t even operate a drive-thru properly.

I ask this out of genuine, burning curiosity, and mean no rudeness by this…

Did you read the article that the OP linked to?

I don’t mean to single you out with this question, I’m just confused after scrolling this far through sooo many similar comments. It almost feels as if I somehow ended up reading a different article from everyone else.

Did you read the article?

callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human.

So if somebody calls and is completely out of his mind, what will AI do?

So if somebody calls and is completely out of his mind, what will AI do?

Is this a rhetorical question?

Just in case you wanted a real answer: The caller is obviously not saying “yes,” so transfer to human.

To be clear: I don’t know anyone at Carbyne or OPCD. I can only offer speculation. But I’m curious: What would you have guessed?

What if someone is obviously out of their mind and says yes? Random example, say someone has a stroke and has just barely figured out how to use the big red emergency call button on their phone screen. The AI asks if they are calling about blah blah emergency. Maybe the person only understands half of it, thinks they’re being asked if they’re calling about an emergency and say “yes”. Now they’re stuck having a form letter read to them by AI while their brain is dying. A person would catch something was up even if they said yes.

The article even notes this can be a problem without anything medical going on:

It’s also possible that AI agents handling 911 triage could fail to understand individuals with stronger accents and dialects, as well as differences in pitch and articulation. This is because AI is programmed with automatic speech recognition systems and, therefore, could potentialy be unreliable when presented with a speech unlike the ones used the AI is trained to recognize.

Responding to people having emergencies is too important a task to leave up to voice recognition slapped on top of an LLM.

I don’t know the concrete answer to your "what if,’ and I don’t think you or the author of the article do either. That would be a question for Carbyne.

I would speculate that there is an answer, and that neither you nor the author are the first to think of these problem scenarios. There’s design, engineering, and real-world testing involved.

“Well I just trust they thought of it” isn’t good enough.

If you’re unsatisfied with my answer, then maybe consider asking them. I’m just a guy writing comments on Lemmy.

A person would catch something was up even if they said yes.

Besides “because it supports the conclusion I want to arrive at”, what makes you believe this is true?

People having a stroke can’t carry on a conversation and seem normal.

Sure, usually, but compare like to like. If a human operator asked if the call was about an already known scenario and transferred people to an automated service if they said “yes”, then the same exact thing could happen.

You attemtped to craft a very specific scenario in which harm would result, when in reality it is wildly unlikely that someone would call in at that precise time and only respond with the word “yes”.

I can only speculate as to why you would do that.

I gave a single example of one way that AI can miss a genuine emergency in a way that a human operator won’t. ‘Nobody will ever call 911 with a stroke and be confused’ isn’t a realistic defense of removing the best system we have of assessing information, the human brain.

It would have to be a stroke during the time there was an ongoing scenario that resulted in higher than typical call volume about the scenario, and a stroke victim calling in who could only say “yes”.

Not impossible, but wildly unlikely.

It doesn’t have to be a stroke, do you really think that’s the only thing that can make people confused or give anything other than the expected answer? Panic, being hard of hearing, sometimes people even have to pretend to be calling someone else so that they can call for help in front of an abuser.

You’re really married to the idea of this being unable to go wrong.

I’m actually married to the idea that the same thing could go wrong with a human, so from that standpoint it’s a wash.

Again, a human being and an LLM strapped on top of voice recognition are not the same thing. A person can understand tone and context that an LLM can’t. It absolutely can’t perform at the same level while taking fucking drive through orders and you think it can function in an emergency? ‘Well people can make mistakes too’ isn’t going to bring back anyone who dies because of this.

All it needs to do is be at least as good as a human, and humans get tired, distracted, irritable, etc. so it’s pretty easy to outperform humans.

It’s only looking for the word “yes”. Literally any other sound and it routes to a human.

The difference being that operators aren’t working tired, distracted, and irritable for their entire shift while AI is functionally brain damaged the entire time.

If you’re going to refuse to acknowledge that just listening for the word ‘yes’ isn’t enough in an emergency situation then there’s no point in continuing this. Which, if it’s literally just a binary yes/no why the hell do we need AI and not ‘press 1 if you’re calling about x emergency’?

Which, if it’s literally just a binary yes/no why the hell do we need AI and not ‘press 1 if you’re calling about x emergency’?

But but but what if the person is stroking out and presses 1 when they meant 2???

Oh, so that is a concern when it comes to pointing out the ways in which AI is a solution looking for a problem, but not when it comes to pointing out this could kill people?

Not that you bothered to ask, but my solution is to add enough operators so that they aren’t working barely staffed at all times and getting overwhelmed the second more than a few calls come in. Working constantly at minimum staffing is the problem, this was solvable before 2022 without AI and it still isn’t necessary.

I thought the extra question marks would have made it clear I was being sarcastic. No sarcasm this time: I’m sorry I wasn’t clear enough. That’s on me. Sorry.

My ambiguous sarcasm aside, I was pointing out that your solution also had the same problem you were trying to solve, because that problem is always there, no matter what.

Not that you bothered to ask, but my solution is to add enough operators so that they aren’t working barely staffed at all times and getting overwhelmed the second more than a few calls come in.

And if we lived in a world where money wasn’t very frequently the limiting factor, your solution might have merit. Unfortunately, capitalism is still something we have to deal with.

I guess you don’t have lots of interaction with AI yet?

Very incorrect. Why do you ask?

I gave you the benefit of the doubt. If you’ve had lots of interactions with AI, I am not sure how you can think that anything with AI can work as expected, specially in complicated edge cases.

If you’ve had lots of interactions with AI, I am not sure how you can think that anything with AI can work as expected

That’s a very broad statement, and “AI fluency” is a broad spectrum. Having “lots of interactions with AI” isn’t an indicator of much at all – lots of end users use LLMs every day. They have “lots of interactions with AI”, but most of them have not developed/trained agent “skill” files, built agent workflows, developed harnesses, handed complex tasks to a “team” of agents (and tuning them for reliability and fidelity), etc. Anyone can have lots of interactions with AI without ever experimenting beyond the consumer-grade interfaces.

Asking if someone has had “lots of interactions with AI” says much more about the experience of the person asking. A lot of “advanced” (using the term very loosely here) users/builders would know that your concern is an easy problem to solve. It might even be a decent sort of challenge to give an intern/student as a learning exercise, since they already have a lot real-world data (from their 311 trials and other cities/orgs that also use this tech) to use for testing and iterating.

You seem to see yourself as experienced AI user, but all you do is repeat the empty marketing promises.

The fact is, if they use an LLM, there will be mistakes, just like Claude will happily ignore part of it’s instructions a few times per day.

And I think that “AI fluency” is not a thing, AI makes you lose your critical thinking skills, which then makes you rely even more on AI.

You seem to see yourself as experienced AI user, but all you do is repeat the empty marketing promises.

Which ones? There are lots of empty marketing promises around AI; the signal-to-noise ratio is crazy. I try avoid the ones that I’m not confident in, but I admit that I don’t always express that clearly enough. (It’s sort of a bad habit/weak skill for me. These things are more obvious and sort of become “common sense” amongst colleagues, and I’ve never been much of a social media guy.)

I’m happy to try to clarify something, if needed.

The fact is, if they use an LLM, there will be mistakes, just like Claude will happily ignore part of it’s instructions a few times per day.

Of course there will be. Artificial neural networks are function approximation algorithms.

The thing about LLMs is that they’re almost always configured to run non-deterministically[^1]. Most tools that depend on LLMs can’t be expected to work or fail deterministically. Building these tools is an iterative process of evaluating and tuning to maximize success rate, thus minimizing failure rate. So yes, LLM-based tech like this will definitely fuck up with a non-zero failure rate. And no, you probably won’t hear about this amongst the marketing noise.

Regarding the problem that the 911 triage thing aims to address: The solution would probably be to hire more operators/dispatchers. Unfortunately, there has been a nationwide shortage of them for years. The AI triage thing has proven to have a success rate high enough (and thus a failure rate low enough) to provide net-positive value[^2]. It doesn’t 100% solve the problem, it just mitigates it, so the situation is less bad – not solved.

[^1]: This is the temperature hyperparameter. There are reasons for needing it to run non-deterministically, but that’s another topic.

[^2]: Sort of like vaccines or condoms: While not 100% effective, their success rate is high enough to provide real value.

“AI fluency” is not a thing

It absolutely is a thing, and usually becomes VERY obvious when you start building things to use LLMs for automation. It’s like those iceberg memes. I’m not sure if “AI fluency” is the “correct” (as in widely-adopted) term for it though, but some people have called it that.

Some even try to quantify this, in some industries. For example, I’ve heard of a “Yegge scale” (or something like that) to estimate the AI fluency of a software engineer.

AI makes you lose your critical thinking skills, which then makes you rely even more on AI.

This is a very broad statement. It’s not always true, and not always false. It really depends on how the person uses AI. But yes, it’s true for a lot of everyday users of the mainstream, consumer-grade interfaces (e.g. ChatGPT) who offload their thinking to AI. It’s one of many sources of brainrot for the masses, and that sucks. I suppose that’s a different topic though.

Apologies for the wall of text. People often make such loaded, over-generalized (though usually reasonable) statements in AI-related conversations, and I have a bad habit of yapping about the nuances 😬

AI has already killed way, way more people already by denying insurance claims. People don’t care because it’s just paperwork, though.

They know it will. They don’t care.

Fortunately those most directly involved in the decision have put their names on record to be held criminally accountable should any deaths occur that might have been avoided by the use of human operators and have thereby promised not to fade into the background when it all goes wrong.

They won’t ever be held accountable by any legal process.

“You’re absolutely right, I was wrong to diagnosed profuse bleeding from the anus as just a mild head cold. Perhaps I should send an ambulance after… sorry token limit reached…”

Triggering headline I know but if you rtfa this is to deal with a real problem with 911 services. The vast majority of time one or two people can man a 911 line effectively even in a moderate sized city. However when a publically visible event occurs or mass casualty situation occurs there is a major triage problem sorting through redundant reporting of the same issue. A simple screen activated in these events that can be easily bypassed to reach a human if there is actual acute distress can free the human up to focus on the most relevant calls more quickly.

This is piss poor low effort reporting as the most relevant take on this would be to get ahold of an actual 911 call responder and get their take on this.

You really don’t need an AI for this though. With the number of mass shootings the US sees, it’s honestly shocking that they don’t have a button the operator can press to activate an auto-reply along the lines of “We are already responding to <event>, if you still want to talk to us, press 1 or wait for a reply.”, which waits something like 10s before going through.

This would filter out a bunch of duplicate reporting with far less effort, and with less odds of something going wrong.

100%

I watched a video about a guy building his own Stonehenge the other day. Using gravity and some cool techniques, the guy moves massive stones BY HIMSELF.

Meanwhile you have people so breathlessly stupid they think that the pyramids were built by aliens because “stone heavy, these people didn’t have construction equipment!!!”.

Modern tech does not mean solutions didn’t exist before. We have forgotten so much in the name of selling products that a simple solution like yours goes overlooked in favor of fucking AI and a third party company that surely definitely cares about 911.

You can’t put a barrier between emergency services and someone in an emergency. Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.

Just overstaff your call center. That’s it.

Spend a little extra money to ensure your emergency workers aren’t stressed out 24x7, and they’ll have the staff to manage a bigger event.

It’s an emergency service. Spend money on it like it’s important.

Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.

Which is why I’m saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.

It’s easy to say “just over staff” until you’re faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you’re faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It’s not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.

What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99… % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.

In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that’s the hard part.

This is actually a product intrado sells to places to handle overflow 911 calls, it’s been a Thing forever, unfortunately seems like municipalities are getting drunk on the AI kool-aid like everyone else 😢

„Not only do I not care, it’s also funny to hear you scream“

Jfc such abysmal concern for human life

They should be doing this for the voluntary UHF 5/35 duplex emergency repeaters in my opinion.

Please listen closely to our menu as our options have recently changed…

cisco hold music banger fires up

What could possibly go wrong?

Fuck this is dark.

If the people profiting from this were to be executed when the system cost the first human life, it wouldn’t make it to a proposal.

Yeah except we live in a capitalism dystopian hellhole. The people who brought this idea to fruition will be celebrated by the Epstein Class; for saving money and getting rid of the poors.

Yes it is dark:

This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human.

This combats multitudes of calls piling up and taking longer time to potentially answer an emergency call. The OPCD said the AI will not be used to handle emergency calls, only to direct such calls to a human dispatcher.

Basically they are testing this to see if they can handle multiple callers to keep the lines and operators open for new emergencies. They are testing and not being irresponsible.

What is dark about this is that nobody even read the fucking article but jumps to conclusion on the fucking clickbait headline. We are becoming a global civilization of programmed morons where you only have to hit the right trigger word and everyone goes stupid.

Press 1 if your being raped press 2 if someone is trying to kill you please hold.

You have selected “regicide”. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press 1…

I love this gag!

People will die.

Yeah but it’s just poor people so who cares. Look at the sweet pool the AI company bought whoever approved this!

Sounds like tiered classes of privatized healthcare is well under way. Platinum trauma team subscriptions are getting closer.

Yeah, rich people call 10-1-1. LOL.

That’s the point. It’s cheaper than dealing with what is coming.

The Farquuad meme

“Some if you may die, but its a sacrifice I am willing to make”

How many? And how does that number compare to how many people died due to call volume surges before implementing this triage tech?

They know this and they don’t care.

Wow! With all the calls in NOLA… seems like one of the dumbest things to use during someone’s emergency! What if someone was being kidnapped and an open line and the AI voice is going to try to keep talking therefore, killing the individual because they heard the damn AI voice repeating shit to try to answer the call!

People are going to die and many civil suits and wrongful death suits are going to be filed and TAX payers are going to have to pay for each damn suit! So in the long run… NO AI for a damn EMERGENCY LINE! This will NOT save money or lives!!

What could possibly go wrong?

Possible second-tier harm here: are they sending 911 calls directly to a company? That’s gotta be illegal, no?

I’m guessing you’ve never heard of Intrado, was pretty much the only profitable part of the company I used to work for, before private equity bought the company and laid off tons of workers. I left before I ended up on the chopping block.

What kind of stupid politician is claiming to be working as the people’s representative with this policy?

“No, I said MASS SHOOTING, not missed movie!”

Oops! I’m really glad you clarified that for me. Would you like me to give you first aid tips?

If anyone bothered to read the article, it’s not nearly as stupid as it sounds. That’s not to say it’s a good idea, just that not nearly as dumb as people are making it out to be.

It’s designed specifically to handle multiple callers who are calling about existing/known incidents, as a tool to relieve human operators, and simply gather additional details, or provide information to the callers.

So while I can’t say that I’m in favor of it, the actual scope of deployment is much different than what the headline would have you believe.

“This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human.”

Imagine being in a life or death situation or delerious and having to now decode what the AI is asking you about whether or not this is “regarding the incident”?

How does that even work? Is it gonna be like " oh hey, is this about the rape at 100 Rfucked Lane?"

More likely “we noticed you said that this is about a wreck. We’ve determined that this is about the same wreck we are already getting calls about (because no way two or more wrecks would occur on the highway the same day) so please go ahead and leave any new information here!” And its just a robot.

Imagine trying to whisper that you are in immediate danger and some AI is like “I didn’t catch that, could you please speak up” forcing you to talk full volume into the phone. Or, maybe you’re screaming too loud where a human can make sense of it but an AI is just hallucinating what it thinks you’re saying.

It’s a horrible idea and 20 years ago I would say I am shocked but not anymore. They don’t care about us.

what’s the polymarket over/under for how many people have to die before they roll this back?

I predict a dramatic increase in the number of suicides. Specifically among those desperately calling 911 for help.

But higher satisfaction from those calling 911 for cookie recipes!

AIneOneOne: I understand your concern that you had an accident and hit a tree — a lost limb hurts, but did you know that oak trees are are hosts to more caterpillar species than any other species in North America?

[Waning consciousness] …help…

Sure! I can help you with that!
One of the most fascinating facts about oak trees is that they function almost like wildlife restaurants—especially for caterpillars, which are essential food for birds and many other animals.

Here are some useful facts:

🌳 Oaks are the No. 1 caterpillar-producing plant genus in North America. Ecologist Doug Tallamy and colleagues compiled host-plant records and found that oaks (Quercus) support more species of caterpillars than any other plant genus.
🐛 In the Mid-Atlantic alone, oaks support about 557 species of caterpillars. That’s [wall of text]

[Death]

Would you like to learn more about the different species of oak around the world?

Went looking in the comments for the new emergency number. Guess I kind of found it. So easy to remember!

011.8999.881.99.9119.725… … … … … 3

Well, that’s easy to remember

Capitalism creating situations that won’t outright be responsible for murder, but will definitely increase deaths among vulnerable people.

Evolution selecting for good capitalists.

This is borderline outright responsible for murder. Maybe not exactly but so close its hard to tell it apart.

And of course the oligarchy hiring PMCs.

Lmao. Guess we’ll all die terrified. I’d be interested to know why, but it looks like its some cops’ decision. I don’t wonder why they get to hurt even more people.

The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is changing the way dispatch calls are handled in New Orleans with the implementation of new technology.

There’s a lot of things to blame the police for, but this isn’t one of them. Besides, emergency services aren’t just cops. Why would they have all the say over a hotline they compose only one facet of?

Because I misread, probably? But its the kind of massively overreaching think I’m used to cops doing or trying to do here. Glad we have a different group of people to blame.

Fucking disgusting. The people making these decisions should be responsible for every person this causes harm too.

Setting aside the obvious, what’s the worst that can happen?

The people responding to emergencies will be notified by AI slop with no human filter.

I said, “setting aside the obvious!” Besides that issue and a handful of others, it should be fine.

Aside from the fact that it obviously won’t work worth a shit, I guess nothing?

It sounds like that’s a better alternative than what they had before though, no?

Side note: either I’m wildly misunderstanding something in the article, or a BIG majority of commenters here didn’t actually read it. I’d expect some amount of the latter, but it really seems disproportionate here.

There will be plenty of lawsuits in the Red Run Louisiana Oblast.

They know New Orleans is on borrowed time but they don’t want to spend money helping people and businesses relocate so they will just kill New Orleans off.

People need to police their neighborhoods. Using AI as the touchpoint for routing emergencies sends a really clear message; the cops aren’t prioritizing the public safety aspect of their job. But then again, acab exists because they’ve always prioritized the power of the state and the financially connected.

It seems like they’re doing this because they are prioritizating the public safety aspect of the job, no?

It is a attempt to reduce staff and save money. On every level it will delay response time and increase risk to those calling.

Easy fix:

• Find the person who introduced this
• Wait until the moment they go live with this
• Cause an emergency that involves said person
• Problemo solved

Have these people never used AI on phones before? Its horrible. Worse than horrible.

Wow. This was a really bad decision. I can’t imagine how many people are going to die from this

:sigh: Yet again, nobody reads the fucking article and it is VERY obvious from most of the comments. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t fucking comment.

If you had READ the article: They’re answering with the AI saying like “Are you calling about X?” If the callers says no, they are transferred to a human. If they ARE calling about an incident, then they can get updates and information about it.

Now, I grant that this is still not perfect, but the stated goal is humans spending less time talking to people reporting an incident already reported so they can actually talk to people needing help faster.

Assuming that works out, this is actually a good idea and an improvement.

Now, if you wanna be cynical about it, fine. But just read the damn article and be cynical about what’s actually happening, not about what you think from the headline, or all you end up looking like an ass.

I came into the comments to have a good discussion on the issue. I should have known better. I’m so irritated by the majority of comments that I lost interested in the topic itself, even though there’s at least one ofther comment I saw also pointing out what the article says. But no, the majority of you can’t be bothered, so screw this. And you bitch about reddit.

Daddy chill

Just as long as you acknowledge the proper parental relationship here, son.

lol :P

So, Lemmy really seems to love these two things:

• Getting angry at things
• Having their biases confirmed

If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?

Yeah, its not handling “my grandma is dying pls send emt” calls, but more “The concert hall is on fire” call #450.

That being said, I disagree with most applications of AI that prevent human interaction. Just because im the 40th person calling about a situation doesnt mean my call is useless, it means i might have new information on an evolving situation.

Still, it’s a sloppy headline designed for clicks or thumbs up. It would be more accurate if it was “AI is to initially screen calls….”

sensationalized headlines aren’t new. If anything they’re more important now than ever

You don’t need “ai” for this though. IVRs have been doing this for literal decades. Your average dialup ISP had a standard option for times of outages ffs.

Read the article. This system will get people killed in the name of efficiency. AI is nowhere near ready to route emergency calls.

What about callers that can’t talk or have accents. The only proper way is to have a human answer and then transfer to an AI, not the other way around. Perhaps decades from now when theses systems are much more reliable we could trust it to be the front line, but we are nowhere near this yet.

If you have something to say, please say it. All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.

Read the article.

What do you fucking think I did?

If you have something to say, please say it.

I fucking well did.

All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.

Try reading all of my fucking comment then.

What about

Depends on how they implement it. I would assume they’re bound to be ahead on you on this one because some callers also can’t say anything on the line because of danger, so they are aware of this issue. Since we don’t have concrete details, we’ll have to speculate on how they handle such things.

I won’t bother to speculate further with you because I know you won’t read it anyway.

No, I meant I read the article, sorry if that wasn’t clear. You were bitching about people not reading it, I did.

We don’t have to speculate, these same systems are being used as call agents and front line contacts for many industries now. Having dealt with these agents firsthand I can tell you they are extremely limited and pretty much garbage unless you have an issue that could easily be answered by looking at their web page.

There is no possible way to currently reduce the error rate, stop GIGO issues, audit the decision making process, stop hallucinations, etc. To even pretend these are ready for emergency situations is such a gross lack of discernment that I would consider it criminal in nature.

It is problematic to even provide the most basic service of screening of phone calls considering it could be costing previous time in an emergency. If it is a manpower issue then they should be fixing it there and not lookimg for a quick fix.

Also, you know it will not stop there. Their goal is triage so you know they are eventually moving towards far more than a simple public service emergency announcement. You will not be talking to a human in the future but a LLM that will kill people when it makes mistakes and won’t be held accountable.

No, I meant I read the article, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

LOL. English ambiguity strikes again. Sorry for the misfire, totally my fault. Thanks for the kind reply and patience with me <3

I do disagree that there’s no way to make it work pretty safe. Instead of defaulting to holding someone in the AI loop until they talk their way out of it, you can simply set it up to stay in the loop only if it’s sure it needs to continue, i.e. anything other than something it gets like “Oh, yes, that’s what I was calling about”, it should dump them to a human.

And we don’t know if they’ve set it up something like that or not. I humbly disagree that we know for sure they have not, no matter how other systems are configured.

And I also disagree that it will necessarily turn out poorly. It literally depends on how they do it. But that said, it is analgous to taking humans out of the driver’s seat in the car. At some point, it will be statistically ten times safer for automated driving to drive you than letting people drive. And when we get to that point, people will be up in arms that automated driving is killing people - when it is literally only a tenth of the previous rate of death. But we humans don’t like giving up that sort of control.

AI is new technology. I’m not totally behind them doing this, but I see the goal. And if they configure it correctly to fail-to-human rather than fail-to-AI-loop, I can see how this can save lives, not lose them. Of course if you’re right and they screw it up it could be worse. I guess we’ll see with time what they do and how it works.

But I firmly believe that trying to fight against all the tech is the wrong move. It’s like trying to fight to keep woodchoppers employed. The tech is there and much of what it is doing is inevitable. What we should be focused on is solving wealth inequality, solving our oligarch problem, solving the lack of social safety nets, living wages, our government working for all of us, not just bilionaires.

So you and I probably aren’t going to see eye to eye on this, but I can respect you better now that I know what you were saying better. :) Sorry to have flubbed that!

Pretty safe? I am sorry but if it is your life on the line or a loved one pretty safe is just not going to cut it. When the AI decides your dying grandmother isn’t priority because of a reason no one can explain or audit what then.This is a huge safety issue than you hand wave away because you are apparently enamored with AI.

I am trying to keep an open mind but replacing human thinking in emergency situations is not a reasonable application. You want a LLM model to triage your medical care with an unproven model that can and does make serious mistakes?

foley.com/…/stanford-study-finds-high-percentage-…

This is not speculation. These companies are selling snake oil at this point and you act as their carnival barker. I do think that decades in the future these systems will be ready for these challenges, but I am not insane enough to believe this roll out is anything other than a cash grab at this point.

I find your statement that humans don’t like giving up control very disturbing. We obviously do give up control for routine low level things like GPS everyday. This is not what your are alluding to though. You are advocating for giving up a higher level of control to an algorithm that can’t be held accountable.

Maybe you are ready for a world of half baked customer agents, managers, counselors, architects, artists, doctors, teachers, judges, emergency dispatchers, etc but I am not. Ceding our control to a corporatocracy of profit driven yes men is not going to end well.

I’ll keep it simple and based on the article in question:

Right now, people who need help are waiting longer to talk to an operator becauase operators field lots of calls about large incidents (or well-witnessed incidents).

That’s causing harm RIGHT NOW.

The theory is that if you offer callers a way to NOT TAKE UP OPERATOR TIME for incidents that are known, then the people who need help talk to an operator faster and get help faster.

That is what the article presents as what they’re doing.

Everything you are saying is pure speculation.

You may well be right. We’ll see.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate this problem which do not require a AI solution. I find it insulting that you think it is the best solution considering their is no evidence of its effectiveness. In fact, I have presented why there are many reasons for concern.

The willingness for government to invest in unproven technology rather than increase manpower or develop their own mass alert systems is dysfunctional to say the least. The fact that they often commit to these plans without consulting experts or asking for public comment is dishonest and corrupt.

I have already had to deal with multiple people suffering from AI psychosis so I am not the biggest fan. You say real harm and AI is already doing it everyday. I see your retreat to reductionisism but I don’t find it compelling in this instance. As I already alluded to, we know where this is going.

I find it insulting that you think it is the best solution

And I find you taking insult to be tiring.

And where did I say it was the best solution? Do not put words in my mouth

Go off an be unhappy in your little world of unhappiness.

If you have a chip on your shoulder that is fine. You have already demonstrated your bombastic behavior as well and shown the ability for reflection. I appreciate that. Cheers!

Ironic. Attempts to be clever. Oh well.

This is Lemmy and it says AI. Expect nobody to read and for panties to twist so hard their legs come off.

As I replied to a similar comment, in fairness - my panties came off as well. hehe (but for a valid reason, dammit! :slams fist on desk:)

I increasingly hate Lemmy for the way this seems to constantly happen on this topic and others. It’s like users are caricatures of opinions instead of people. Which, hey, maybe that’s prescient.

I think it’s an internet thing, not a Lemmy thing, to be honest.

I’m a voracious reader. I’m on Lemmy and basically not on reddit anymore because I want to have good discussions. And sometimes the discussions are pretty decent, but things like this put me off a bit.

It’s still a pretty decent platform overall. Although that might say more about the state of the internet at large than it does say good things about Lemmy. heh. But I’m still here. :)

It’s a human thing, above all else. If they wanted logical reasonable discussion, they should talk to robots. Except that’s the thing they hate

Holy shit, I’m actually surprised how bad the rest of the comments are… And the volume of them!

I’ll try to TL;DR it for the lemmings, with formatting that is (hopefully) easy to understand for even the most rotten of brains.

TL;DR

The problem

• Too many people are all calling 911 about the same emergency.

I’ll use this example scenario below: People keep driving past a burning car on a busy road, and many of them call 911. (This will continue to happen until an emergency responder arrives.)

Before implementing this tech

• 911 operators are all busy answering calls that are all reporting the same car fire
• Long 911 hold time for someone with an emergency unrelated to the car fire

After implementing this tech

Bot: "Are you calling about the car fire on Seventh Street?"

• If caller answers “yes”:
  • AI bot tells them that responders have already been dispatched
• If caller answers anything other than “yes”:
  • Transfer to the next available human dispatcher
  • Greatly reduced hold time thanks to automated triage

If the critical failure point is accurately classifying “yes” or “not yes,” even the dumbest^1 models could handle that – and I doubt they use the dumbest models for 911 triage.

Even if it’s not 100% perfect every time, this still sounds like a net positive.

I have to agree with you one hundred, /u/percent

:)

• If caller answers “yes”:
• AI bot tells them that responders have already >been dispatched

So you’re gating whether or not a caller in an emergency gets to speak to a human based on the audio recognition of a robot?

Easy enough to make it so that if the bot doesn’t hear a yes or a no clearly it defaults to forwarding the call, but what happens when a person says no and the bot “hears” yes?

I believe I touched on that in my last sentence, but I can elaborate:

That will probably happen – neural networks are approximation algorithms. It’s a question of how often that happens.

What percentage of the calls get misclassified? And what’s the threshold percentage that would be needed for the triage bot to be a net positive?

It sounds like they have an idea of these numbers based on data collected from the non-emergency line, so it’s not like they’re just blindly jumping into this.

EDIT: I just realized that I did not actually answer your question of “what happens”…

I imagine the caller would just interrupt the AI’s answer (e.g. “No not that,” “HELP,” “Give me a human,” “FUCK!” etc.)? That seems like the natural thing to do.

To be clear: I don’t know anyone at Carbyne or OPCD. I can only offer speculation.

I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.

Can you really justify someone not being able to reach help at all in place of everyone being able to reach it albeit slower?

As a lifelong first responder, I couldn’t get behind something like this at all.

how long could the queue be? If someone can’t wait 60 seconds for the queue, but can take the 8 seconds to ask if it’s about X incident. I do imagine it will be smart enough to check their approximate location before giving the prompt

:sigh: Okay, I’ll try to break it down even more…

I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.

Exactly. That’s what they want to solve.

TL;DR: Even when callers reach the triage bot, they can still reach a human much faster than without the triage bot.

Comparing again:

• WITHOUT the triage tech:

  • NOBODY (or nothing) answers the call for a long while, because the caller is stuck in a very long queue of calls waiting to tell them about the same emergency

• WITH the triage tech:

  • AI bot answers the call instantly and probably knows how to help because the call is probably about the same emergency that 95% of the other calls are about
    • so 95% less spam for the human operators to get through
  • If the call is NOT about the same thing as the others, the caller can simply say that (i.e., “no”), and they reach a human within, say, 5-10 seconds because the operators aren’t busy trying to get through the spam calls

They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.

None of that applies if a caller just can’t get through at all because the bot mistook “no” for “yes”

I believe the argument is that the probability of misclassifying an arbitrary segment of speech as the very particular answer “yes” is sufficiently low (with reasonably trained, current models) that we may ignore it under practical circumstances.

I find the non-zero probability of misclassifying in a little disquieting, but I suppose one way of looking at it is that this will probably increase the expected value of lives saved; the very probable case (calls are correctly filtered and a smaller proportion is passed through, allowing operators to respond to more new emergencies) may save a lot of lives, whereas the very improbable case (something that is not “yes” is misclassified as such) may endanger a few.

One thing that would worry me about just looking at expected values is the possibility of bias against a particular group of people or emergency type, but to me that seems unlikely in this case.

Edit: it also just occurred to me that if you are woefully unfortunate, you can probably just call again if you accept the assumption that there is a high probability the answer is yes given the model classified it as such. It might be more or less random chance?

Yeah I just don’t buy that there is a case where any “net gain” here is justified. These are people’s lives that you’re playing with by reducing them to what amounts to a balance sheet in the name of saving money.

The idea that you would create the possibility of denying someone emergency care that didn’t exist before, no matter how improbable (probably not even that improbable, given the propensity even the most advanced frontier AI models have for getting things wrong or hallucinating entirely despite simple instructions) just to save 10-15 seconds on average for other callers is not only absurd on its face, but morally bankrupt. You can personally ignore it because you don’t live there and it’s not the lives of you or your family at stake. I think those who this system could fail would not be able to ignore a flaw like that when it happens to them, and the idea that their peril was “highly improbable” will not be of much comfort to them.

The problem is that there are staffing shortages. The solution is hiring more staff. Trying to cheat our way out by implementing a system prone to unmitigatable flaws that could have life-altering or even life ending consequences isn’t a solution, it’s dystopian.

Do you honestly think that nobody has thought about that and solved that problem already? Even with all the engineers involved, and after all the real-world testing, you’re the first to have considered that scenario?

Even consumer-grade products like ChatGPT can be interrupted while talking. We’re talking about an AI implementation, not some rigid set of if…else statements.

Do you honestly think that nobody has thought about that and solved that problem already? Even with all the engineers involved, and after all the real-world testing,

That is the thought process of a child. If your defense of something with obvious issues is “Well I’m sure they know what they’re doing, because if they didn’t it would be bad”, I have some really, really bad news for you about the world.

If this was thought through by a capable adult, it would’t be implemented at all. The very fact that this solution is on the table is proof of the breakdown of rational thought. Or more likely, greased palms.

Your blind appeal to authority would hold more water if we haven’t already seen national adoption of AI products in emergency services that that have catastrophically failed to perform their basic functions, leading to real world harm. Audits of Flock cameras deployed in several cities found an error rate ranging from 33-70%. People are being arrested for things they didn’t do because the AI doesn’t work and nobody cares. People are being stalked because nobody thought of basic security controls.

We’re talking about an AI implementation, not some rigid set of if…elsestatements.

Even worse, we’re talking about an AI implementation of if…else statements. Regular if else statements are consistent. As soon as you throw AI into the mix they become unpredictable. You introduce a failure mode that didn’t exist before that can and will have real consequences.

So… you do assume that you’re the first to think of this problem, or…?

If you assume that your brain is somehow superior[^1] to everyone involved in the R&D, engineering, data analysts/QC, etc., then this may come as a surprise to you: You’re not even the first Lemmy commenter to think of it.

Literally multiple people here already thought about that and commented before you did. They’re not the first either; the author of the article herself even thought about it.

This idea is among the most obvious potential problems that come to mind within seconds or minutes of just hearing about the concept. It’s not a dumb idea by any means (it’s completely valid), it’s just not a particularly smart or special one.

911 is not the first department in that city[^2] to use this tech, and that city isn’t even the first to adopt it. It’s silly to assume that such an easy-to-solve problem hasn’t been addressed by now, or that it somehow has yet to happen in other deployments.

[^1]: To be clear: I make no assumptions that your brain is not superior to theirs either – I couldn’t possibly know either way. AFAIK, I’ve never even met you nor them… But I think it would be a safe bet that you don’t know either.

[^2]: BTW, have you heard cajun accents? There’s no way this bridge hasn’t already been crossed during their 311 trials.

As someone who worked in the industry, your trust is wildly misplaced. I guarantee someone has already said internally this will not work and was shushed by a sales manager.

And as far as “I am sure they tested accents” goes? HA they likely noted it was a mess and moved on. You think the goal is a functioning system, but it is not it is just to make the sale.

Why does it have to be AI? Why can’t it be “press 1 for the highway car fire on 42, press 2 to be transferred to an operator”? Surely that’s much less likely to fail?

infosec.pub/comment/23116617

That doesn’t answer my question at all?

Ah, right, I suppose it’s contextual. You would also have to read the comment that it’s responding to. To summarize: it might not have to be AI.

However, 911 is a bit too dynamic for your solution to be viable as-is. For example, “Hey Siri/Google, I can’t move my hands. Call 911.”

Your idea is probably a decent starting point for brainstorming a solution — it just needs more thought, research, testing, etc. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar product already exists. (I’d actually be surprised if it doesn’t already exist.)

You talk as if they don’t already have customer facing implementations in effect, and that those all suck and don’t work worth shit. You also seem to think the “engineers” involved are custom doing anything and not just some sales person slapping a half baked product on every problem. When you get paid per deployed program, everything looks like a problem to solve with said program.

This is an issue of not having enough 911 dispatchers, due to the unwillingness to pay for them. The idea of putting in a chatbot, that can not even speed up diction let alone have any empathy is just wildly inappropriate in this situation. The fact is that these LLMs will (like in current deployments) most of the time have to pass the call to a person, drastically increasing time on the phone before action is taken. This is already seen in almost all LLM supported call centers, but a 911 dispatch is not a telecom company and more time on the phone is more death, injury and suffering.

You talk as if they don’t already have customer facing implementations in effect,

Mind pointing to where I talk like that? I knew these have already been used in other customer-facing environments before ever commenting, so I’m happy to try to clarify, if needed.

and that those all suck and don’t work worth shit.

Got any sources from within the last year? I ask for the last year because “AI” (LLMs and the overall ecosystem) has become much more capable over the last ~year (maybe a little less, but close enough).

I’ve already seen some reports that are older and, unsurprisingly, terrible. Those earlier generations of LLMs definitely don’t seem like they’d be up to the task – and some cities even had the balls to adopt this tech back in 2023 😬

This is an issue of not having enough 911 dispatchers

Correct, but it’s not like they can just go to the 911 dispatcher store and pick up some dispatchers. The widespread shortages have been a problem since before transformer-based LLMs even existed.

This triage system is a mitigation, not a solution. It makes the bad problem less bad – not solved. Maybe someday there will be enough dispatchers. Unfortunately, we have not reached that “someday” yet.

due to the unwillingness to pay for them.

Source? Not saying you’re wrong – I’m only aware of the shortage because I was friends with a dispatcher. I just never really looked into why there’s a shortage, and now I’m curious.

The idea of putting in a chatbot, that can not even speed up diction

The goal is not to speed up diction – that would be more like “vertical scaling,” or “scaling up.” AI a bad choice for scaling that way, in most cases. AI is much better for “horizontal scaling,” or “scaling out” – so like 20 bots concurrently answering 1 call each, not 1 bot trying to speed-run through 20 calls serially.

The fact is that these LLMs will (like in current deployments)

By “current deployments,” do you mean current 911 deployments, or just things like customer service lines? There’s a huge difference in product requirements between those two. If done the same, then yes, that would be an absolute disaster. That’s not what this is though.

most of the time have to pass the call to a person, drastically increasing time on the phone before action is taken.

Where is this information from? I thought the problem was the surge of calls going to the call center to report the same thing (for example, people calling 911 when driving past a burning car). When that happens, the AI agents actually don’t have to pass most calls to a person, because most calls are about the same emergency (e.g. the car fire example). Did I misunderstand this?

911 dispatch is not a telecom company and more time on the phone is more death, injury and suffering.

Exactly. This system reduces hold times by filtering out the spam about the car fire, freeing up some operators in the understaffed team to deal with more emergencies.

The AI system is obviously slower than a well-staffed team of operators who can handle the call volume surges, but faster than an understaffed team that has to get through the spam. Unfortunately, they’re faced with the latter, so they found a way to at least mitigate the problem a bit.

All of that is just not true, literally all of that huge wall of text. From the odd takes on somehow saying there is and is not examples of LLMs used in call centers that are complete shit (my example would be just to point to any AI agent call I have had to do in the last year) to the clear non understanding of how the speed of diction could be an issue shows that the wall of text you put up has zero substance. Almost as if wrote by chat GPT or the likes. The same issues in a call center for hotdog packaging and 911 will exist and saying “smart people” will handle one better then the other is one of if not the stupidest things I have seen in print.

Your odd hubris is why the world is going to shit. You are the direct reason why we live in interesting times.

All of that is just not true, literally all of that

Incorrect. For example, you really can’t go solve the 911 dispatcher shortage by getting more 911 dispatchers from the 911 dispatcher store, and I stand by that. If you can prove this wrong, please do.

huge wall of text

Apologies for replying to each of your points due to respecting you enough to assume you’re a worthwhile human instead of writing you off as a waste of time. It seems to have frustrated you to some degree…

I’m gonna do it again though.

From the odd takes on somehow saying there is and is not examples of LLMs used in call centers that are complete shit

Where did I say there are no shitty LLM implementations in call centers? I doubt you’ll answer this (you don’t seem to like backing up your claims), but I really am curious. That would not be consistent with my experience with call center LLM implementations at all. I don’t think I’ve ever had a good experience with them.

My shitty little self-hosted smarthome assistant that I slapped together outperforms most of them, and it’s an old, half-assed, neglected side project 😆. (Not much of an achievement when it only has to serve one user though.)

(my example would be just to point to any AI agent call I have had to do in the last year)

Was it a 911 triage agent? If not, then there’s not much of a comparison here. Very different implementations to serve very different purposes. A 911 triage agent should be designed for much simpler, narrower goals than some customer service agent.

to the clear non understanding of how the speed of diction could be an issue

If you’d like to explain it, I’m open to it.

the wall of text you put up has zero substance.

Speaking of that, I noticed that you haven’t answered a single one of the questions related to the substance of your last comment. I’m just curious – Can you? Surely there must be some substance behind your words if that’s something you value, yes?

The same issues in a call center for hotdog packaging and 911 will exist

“will exist”? Future tense? Was this meant to sound so speculative?

New Orleans is not the first city to adopt this 911 triage system. Why speculate when we already have the past and present?

If it helps, I can even point you to a spicy one as head start: If you go far back enough, you’ll find a death in Seattle related to an old LLM implementation in a 911 call center… or something like that. (It has been a while since I read it)

Your odd hubris

Ironic ;)

You are the direct reason why we live in interesting times.

Thanks, but I’m just a guy writing comments on the same network that you’re writing comments on. I may have worked on some AI tools, but nothing public-facing, and nothing really exciting. I’m mostly just a consumer of these “interesting times”… Maybe an indirect reason at best. Not more than a drop in the ocean.

AI is absolutely not needed for this, and is only a liability.

They could say “press 1 if you are calling about X” or even “if you are calling about X, we are already aware of it. If not, you will be transferred to an operator in a moment”.

An automated system like this is easy to implement, easy to audit, and will fail in expected and managable ways.
AI is nondeterministic, and will fail randomly in very unexpected ways.

I (mostly) agree. I was just TL;DR’ing it for the shocking number of people who are commenting about things that are already addressed in the article that they didn’t bother reading.

I hesitate to agree with “absolutely” though. I don’t know enough about their situation to confidently have an opinion that strong[^1].

AI can be useful for some dynamic situations – and 911 call centers can get pretty “dynamic” at times.

Imagine a busy 911 call center. Clippy appears (wearing a firefighter uniform) on an operator’s screen with a message like “The last 4 calls were about the same car fire. There are currently 9 calls in the queue. Want me to triage?” It would take WAY less time for a busy operator to click “Yes” than it would to step away and go record some voice message, configure some automated thing, etc.

[^1]: I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans’), they were overworked.

I hate this stupid AI hype.

How long before it decides “this is an unsafe conversation so i’m going to leave this here”

People are going to die because of that, even if AI is merely handling call “triage”.

I love it.

All of the movies and novels warning of danger from AI, news of AI convincing people kill themselves, suggesting ‘remedies’ that would cause someone to die, or going wrong in some other way… and they decide it would be a great plan to have it answer emergency calls from people who could be in the process of being stabbed to death.

Why? Because it’s cheaper than hiring enough people to do that job.

The nature of the job means that’s very literally deciding that it’s better for more people to die than to increase the budget for 911 operators.

Even more than this one instance, it’s the same reason that AI is running pretty much everything and the streets are full of AI-powered robots when things go wrong in all of those movies and books. Because it’s cheaper than paying a person to do it.

I can’t think of any examples even in science fiction stories where the richest people in the world create AI and robotics and manage to automate pretty much all human labor in order to cut costs that end right there with “and then the super rich now in direct control of all production and society divided their wealth and power evenly among all humans and everyone lived happily ever after.”

That’s just to unrealistic, even for fiction.

You are absolutely right to call me out on that. He did break in, and he is now stabbing you. I will adjust for this in the future. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Brilliant. I can’t wait for all the false calls they will generate with this tech too and then use it as excuse to Gestapo and sent people to the prison camps.

Everyone should read before reacting:

This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human.

This makes sense. A big thing happens that you are aware of. Geolocated calls from that area flood in. An operator, who could be getting useful info, has to handle a flood of “Guess what I just saw!”

Note that I think they should spend the money on more operators instead, but at least this seems like it has good guardrails.

I wish this were pinned at the top. It seems like almost nobody reads beyond the headline.

This is one of the few actually cool and useful implementariins to me. It reminds me of my work writing systems to detect antimicrobial issues in hospitals.

A shame it’s getting so much hate, but they did choose to brand with “AI” so they get what they ask for.

Joe’s Apartment, the 911 call center be like

Except that could be done without AI. Just have a recording that says "we are aware of … taking place near you, are you calling about this ? “, then answer with yes/no.

No need for bullshit AI.

My understanding from other articles is caller satisfaction is greater with the TTS system, and it uses voice IVR to triage of they have additional information. AI is not bullshit in and of itself. This product seems barely diffeent from what they provided with APEX.

Recordings also can’t auto respond with updates to the caller like this can, which is a pretty nice feature, even if it’s just TTS.

caller satisfaction is greater with the TTS system,

You know what’s great about the valley callers who don’t make it?

No bad survey results!

My aunt was pissed when she found a hospital satisfaction survey addressed to her mother, a few weeks after her mom died at that hospital.

Can you share articles, interested how design a dynamic IVR to handle unfolding event and update prompts in realtime as new information is added to original incident.

Have you ever met humans? That would be a recipe for “no I’m not calling about that, I want a human” just to get to a human and say you’re calling about exactly that.

You don’t need AI for that. Automated phone answering systems do exist, and can redirect people.

This is basically a beefed up IVR with better customer satisfaction reports, so… yes.

But as I said in the other comment, giving updates to callers is something a standard answering system can’t do.

How many operators to handle say 100 calls in 5 minutes? Now imagine the cost to staff a small 911 center to ensure your can handle those calls 24/7. The money doesn’t exist.

Butts in seats don’t exist right now either. As long as the fancy ivr allows the caller to reach a human with minimal effort, this seems like a scary sounding but neat assistant solution to a problem without a real solution.

Well it wouldn’t cost much cause you’d only need to employ them for a very short amount of time on occasion. Just have a large team of trained staff on call - its just that simple!

Listen to yourself. Have a large team of trained staff on call. How much do you think that costs? No go on guess. Do some calculations. The people do not exist to fill the seats. The money does not exist to pay the non-existent people. This is an attempt to make an already shitty situation better.

I work in this industry and I read the article. I understand what they are doing. I hate AI but this seems reasonable.

yeah no shit…

So did I completely misread your comment? LOL

I feel like i was pretty clearly joking.

It went over my head. Sorry. Everything is not the onion these days.

Idk what bulb vegetables have to do with this. We’re discussing AI use by the New Orleans Police

So, say a tower block fire happens at 2 am. You’re getting 50 calls a minute, 20% from residents and the rest from people calling to say they see a fire.

How long would it take for your trained staff to spring into action compared to an on demand AI? And are you paying your on-call staff to wait, or only when they’re on the phone?

edit: I’m thinking about the Grenfell Towers. I listened to the BBC’s coverage of the enquiry, and it was rough. Gave me a new appreciation for what emergency responders do.

Are you people really this fucking dense?

Thank you for your insight. I had logistical questions I thought you might could answer, but I see now that I was wrong about that.

Why can you not see that im clearly making a joke. A large team of trained staff on call for emergencies which they’d rush in suddenly to deal with calls like once a year. You dont think that sounds so absurd that its clearly not “just that simple”?

And if someone tries to call with new unreported information about an already reported incident? Decision tree or geolocation routes caller to recorded information. No way of knowing if information is important or not without talking to the caller first. Possible downside is far greater than possible benefits.

Edit Multiple calls about shots in neighborhood, if victim is last to call are they forced to listen to an update before triage allows transfer? No sir I don’t like it.

Maybe this is an improvement in this location, but as many have said a staffing issue.

Functional societies have costs, often those costs are far less than dysfunctional societies.

Even assuming perfect conditions - where the caller very clearly states what’s happening and the AI agent understands everything properly - this is a waste of resources. Just hire more operators dawg. It’s really not that complicated.

And then think about what happens outside of those perfect conditions. So pretty much most calls.

Just hire more operators dawg. It’s really not that complicated.

Have offered your recruiting skills/services to them? The nationwide 911 operator/dispatcher shortage has been a problem for years, so if you find it easy or uncomplicated to recruit them, then your services might be very valuable.

(Yes, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here by assuming that that was an informed opinion.)

Can I get desperately needed help please??? N.O.

So now we’re at the stage of killing people directly, got it!

But universal healthcare leads to death panels or something…

You’re not wrong. Swatting in that area is going to be so easy. United States police force has already shown for years now that if AI says anything they’ll just go with it and not question it. So if someone lives in the area and you want them ‘dealt with’ by the police, it’s going to be very easy. And the police aren’t going to look into it or hold themselves accountable. And the AI won’t be questioned or removed. If this goes large scale you can just make an API… Don’t like someone on twitch, well when you know it there will be an app for that…

shit, I didn’t even think of swatting, just a voice bot stalling really urgent calls for aid or an ambulance until patients die. What you brought up is even worse.

Bro what

This is exhausting y’all. God I fucking hate LLMs so much. This tech could be such a exciting break through, a step towards real artificial intelligence, but stuck in academia where it belongs. Instead of getting to be excited and interested this inanimate compilation of matrices is breathing down my neck constantly.

This tech could be such a exciting break through, a step towards real artificial intelligence

No, not really lol.

The best analogy for this that I’ve heard is that it’s like saying elevators are a step towards teleporters. Calling it “intelligence” is a marketing coup. It is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

But what is intelligence?

-every idiot who can’t tell the difference when they talk to a clanker

Have you seen the first elevators? Or even used a chat bot prior to this? The definition of “AI” for a long time was just “decision trees” or some really neat classification systems. This is different. The hype and terrible business practices is the problem not the idea itself.

I also agree that calling it Artificial intelligence is a marking scheme, it’s a loaded term machine learning is better. This has always kinda been a problem. Technically it’s very loosely defined. I always refer to it as LLMs

Hey I bet Kanye West and a bewildered Mike Myers can explain why…

…too bad Kanye West isn’t around anymore

Cool.

All yall saying this is gunna kill people do not live in New Orleans. 911 is well know to move at the pace of a snail goin the wrong way up an escalator. This can only improve things (it won’t, but anything helps) , worst case it’s a change that no one notices. Some ones nephew got a contract for this, I garuntee it.

Oh I am sure putting a machine that’s only goal is to say things that seem real is going to help that…

Oh, how long until an AI ends up swatting people. There will probably even be different categories:

1. Legit swat scenario, wrong address (or otherwise incorrect details make it turn tragic)
2. Caller deliberately trying to swat innocent victim, AI goes along with it and adds credibility (not that humans seem to take away much credibility, so maybe this one shouldn’t really be a black mark for AIs if it does happen)
3. AI just misinterprets a caller’s description, deploys swat team
4. AI doesn’t trust the caller’s description, deploys swat team (anyone ever seen an agent start suspecting they were in an adversarial situation where something was injecting things into the context? I have)
5. AI uses dispatching tool incorrectly, accidentally deploys swat team

Or just as likely never dispatches in the case of a real emergency. I have a hard time thinking of what could go right.

Hire more operators? Nah Ai bot? Sure Solid logic I also love how bloated police budgets are but get the other departments in the city related are struggling to keep the lights on.

Working my way through Person of Interest again. Just watched one where a search company was directing suicidal inquiries to ads instead of helplines. And that was before they get bought by the evil AI overlord. Its surreal seeing Palantir, Flock and all the tech companies race to implement a dystopia no sane person would ever want and there is so little push back. What the fuck is wrong with regular people?

there are tv shows that explain why this shit shouldn’t be done…

like AI rejecting calls because the people were (rightly) hysterical and the AI could not calm them down.

New Orleans will kill its most vulnerable citizens to enrich tech billionaires.

That title is written by someone who failed basic grammar. It should be “New Orleans will use AI instead of humans to answer 911 calls”.
What it says as it’s written is “AI will only answer 911 calls but not a human”… which doesn’t make any sense.

It’s also sensationalized. I guess the article’s actual headline just isn’t spicy enough:

New Orleans hoping limited AI use could speed response for emergencies