New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human

: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.

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.

• 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.

: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”

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.