New Orleans is using AI to answer 911 calls instead of human dispatchers. What does this mean for crime and emergency response?
  • Fmstrat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9 hours

    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!”

    • Bixcut@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 hours

      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.

  • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12 hours

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

    • Trump Rapes Kids@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 hours

      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.

  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14 hours

    :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.

    • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
      11 hours

      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.

      1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs ↩︎

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 hours
        • 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?

        • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
          11 hours

          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.

          • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10 hours

            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.

      • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
        10 hours

        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.

        • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
          8 hours

          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. ↩︎

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12 hours

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

        • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11 hours

          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.

          • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11 hours

            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. :)

            • Bazoogle@lemmy.worldEnglish
              9 hours

              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

              • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
                7 hours

                If I talk to robots, I get hallucinations. And mostly true things, but it’s hard to trust when they get it wrong a lot of the time. heh.

                But yeah, it’s also human nature. :)

    • Taleya@aussie.zoneEnglish
      12 hours

      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.

    • Greyghoster@aussie.zoneEnglish
      12 hours

      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….”

    • Funkt4st1c@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13 hours

      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.

    • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
      13 hours

      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?

    • Doomsider@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12 hours

      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.

      • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        Read the article.

        TOP EDIT: They were saying they read the article, not that I should read it. d’oh. Sooo, leaving my original below, but oops on misunderstanding! Sorry!

        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.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8 hours

          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.

          • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 hours

            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!

  • Wunz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10 hours

    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?

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.comEnglish
      19 hours

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

    • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
      13 hours

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

    • DanceMomsSavedMe@lemmy.zipEnglish
      13 hours

      The Farquuad meme

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

  • carrylex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15 hours

    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
    • PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.auEnglish
      21 hours

      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.

      • arrow74@lemmy.zipEnglish
        17 hours

        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

        • PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.auEnglish
          11 hours

          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"?

      • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
        13 hours

        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.

        • theolodis@feddit.orgEnglish
          9 hours

          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?

    • spirinolas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21 hours

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

      /s

  • NathanRanch@lemmy.zipEnglish
    17 hours

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

    Evolution selecting for good capitalists.

  • pnwpixel@programming.devEnglish
    15 hours

    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.

    • percent@infosec.pubEnglish
      13 hours

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

      • Crashumbc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12 hours

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

  • DanceMomsSavedMe@lemmy.zipEnglish
    14 hours

    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