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”.
: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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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….”
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:
- Getting angry at things
- Having their biases confirmed
If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?
Also worth noting that I got angry at things AND had my biases confirmed. ;-)
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.
Daddy chill
Just as long as you acknowledge the proper parental relationship here, son.
lol :P
I hate this stupid AI hype.
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
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
How long before it decides “this is an unsafe conversation so i’m going to leave this here”
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.
People will die.
That’s the point. It’s cheaper than dealing with what is coming.
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.
How many? And how does that number compare to how many people died due to call volume surges before implementing this triage tech?
The Farquuad meme
“Some if you may die, but its a sacrifice I am willing to make”
Capitalism creating situations that won’t outright be responsible for murder, but will definitely increase deaths among vulnerable people.
Evolution selecting for good capitalists.
And of course the oligarchy hiring PMCs.
This is borderline outright responsible for murder. Maybe not exactly but so close its hard to tell it apart.
There will be plenty of lawsuits in the Red Run Louisiana Oblast.
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.
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.
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?
This will kill people.
deleted by creator
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.
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"?
But…just think how many money they can save! You are being selfish!
/s
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
