this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
529 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
86982 readers
2978 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This will kill people.
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
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"?
I think the summary of the existing incident and providing updates is where they are using the AI. Which if given a limited data set should work.
These LLM models do actually a good job of summarizing a list of facts you feed it. The issues happen when you want it to make something "new"
For 911 I'd rather the government find the money to fund them, but I do feel like they are using AI in an appropriate scope.
AI should not be used in life and death situations like a 911. But the way they are going about the roll out is demonstrating how to actually use AI as a tool and not some miracle machine.
They should have left it only on the non-emergency line and called it there.
A person could do this better faster cheaper lower odds of failure.
'It can kinda do it sometimes so it's ready to go live' is slopper propaganda. There is no "AI" extant at this date.
This is just an excuse to kill poor people. As all "ai" is.
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?
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:
Responding to people having emergencies is too important a task to leave up to voice recognition slapped on top of an LLM.
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.
The difference being that operators aren’t working tired, distracted, and irritable for their entire shift while AI is functionally brain damaged the entire time.
If you’re going to refuse to acknowledge that just listening for the word ‘yes’ isn’t enough in an emergency situation then there’s no point in continuing this. Which, if it’s literally just a binary yes/no why the hell do we need AI and not ‘press 1 if you’re calling about x emergency’?
But but but what if the person is stroking out and presses 1 when they meant 2???
Oh, so that is a concern when it comes to pointing out the ways in which AI is a solution looking for a problem, but not when it comes to pointing out this could kill people?
Not that you bothered to ask, but my solution is to add enough operators so that they aren’t working barely staffed at all times and getting overwhelmed the second more than a few calls come in. Working constantly at minimum staffing is the problem, this was solvable before 2022 without AI and it still isn’t necessary.
I thought the extra question marks would have made it clear I was being sarcastic. No sarcasm this time: I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough. That's on me. Sorry.
My ambiguous sarcasm aside, I was pointing out that your solution also had the same problem you were trying to solve, because that problem is always there, no matter what.
And if we lived in a world where money wasn't very frequently the limiting factor, your solution might have merit. Unfortunately, capitalism is still something we have to deal with.
I don't know the concrete answer to your "what if,' and I don't think you or the author of the article do either. That would be a question for Carbyne.
I would speculate that there is an answer, and that neither you nor the author are the first to think of these problem scenarios. There's design, engineering, and real-world testing involved.
“Well I just trust they thought of it” isn’t good enough.
If you're unsatisfied with my answer, then maybe consider asking them. I'm just a guy writing comments on Lemmy.
I guess you don't have lots of interaction with AI yet?
Very incorrect. Why do you ask?
I gave you the benefit of the doubt. If you've had lots of interactions with AI, I am not sure how you can think that anything with AI can work as expected, specially in complicated edge cases.
That's a very broad statement, and "AI fluency" is a broad spectrum. Having "lots of interactions with AI" isn't an indicator of much at all – lots of end users use LLMs every day. They have "lots of interactions with AI", but most of them have not developed/trained agent "skill" files, built agent workflows, developed harnesses, handed complex tasks to a "team" of agents (and refining them to perform reliably), etc. Anyone can have lots of interactions with AI without ever experimenting beyond the consumer-grade interfaces.
Asking if someone has had "lots of interactions with AI" says much more about the AI fluency of the person asking. A lot of "advanced" (using the term very loosely here) users/builders would know that your concern is an easy problem to solve. It might even be a decent sort of challenge to give an intern to build/train as one of their first few AI agent skills, since they already have a lot real-world data (from their 311 trials and other cities/orgs that also use this tech) to use for testing and iterating.
But...just think how many money they can save! You are being selfish!
/s
They know it will. They don’t care.
And then it will be nobody's fault, nobody could have predicted this. <- Their pre-planned excuse.