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?

I wish this were pinned at the top. It seems like almost nobody reads beyond the headline.

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.

: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Advertisers might find a way to sneak ads into prompt injections or something

You saw a bunch of people’s home bathrooms while on vacation?

They definitely can be useful as a part of a “productivity machine,” for some people. But yeah, they’re not the whole solution. An LLM alone is much less useful without harnesses and tools.

I suppose one of the difficulties in trying to build a one-size-fits-all thing is that everyone has a different set of use cases and workflows needed for productivity. Each person’s own “productivity machine” might be useless for other people.

Most people (maybe even most tech-oriented people) just aren’t AI-fluent enough to be able to build their own agentic workflows with enough fidelity to actually yield a net-positive effect in productivity. It’s not a user-friendly process for the masses (yet).

This is especially creepy right after watching a video about a cult that behaves similarly if you upset them.

(The cult is called AllatRa, btw. Very interesting rabbit hole)

Do it

I genuinely appreciate the cause, but to sign this, I have to provide PII, agree to their terms of service and privacy policy, and get automatically opted-in to their mailing list that I’ll have to unsubscribe from later.

So to petition against this shitty tech stuff, I have to go through this other shitty tech stuff. It sucks how normalized this all has become.