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

This will kill people.

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.

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.