Can I get desperately needed help please??? N.O.
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.
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.
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 to a problem without a real solution.
Joe's Apartment, the 911 call center be like
I wish this were pinned at the top. It seems like almost nobody reads beyond the headline.
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?
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.
: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.
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.)
Bot: "Are you calling about the car fire on Seventh Street?"
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.
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:
WITH the triage tech:
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.
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 have to agree with you one hundred, /u/percent
:)
This is Lemmy and it says AI. Expect nobody to read and for panties to twist so hard their legs come off.
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.
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
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.
So, Lemmy really seems to love these two things:
If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?
I hate this stupid AI hype.
Easy fix:
People will die.
They know this and they don’t care.
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
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.
This will kill people.
They know it will. They don’t care.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
