Technology

You talk as if they don't already have customer facing implementations in effect, and that those all suck and don't work worth shit. You also seem to think the "engineers" involved are custom doing anything and not just some sales person slapping a half baked product on every problem. When you get paid per deployed program, everything looks like a problem to solve with said program.

This is an issue of not having enough 911 dispatchers, due to the unwillingness to pay for them. The idea of putting in a chatbot, that can not even speed up diction let alone have any empathy is just wildly inappropriate in this situation. The fact is that these LLMs will (like in current deployments) most of the time have to pass the call to a person, drastically increasing time on the phone before action is taken. This is already seen in almost all LLM supported call centers, but a 911 dispatch is not a telecom company and more time on the phone is more death, injury and suffering.

Do you honestly think that nobody has thought about that and solved that problem already? Even with all the engineers involved, and after all the real-world testing,

That is the thought process of a child. If your defense of something with obvious issues is “Well I’m sure they know what they’re doing, because if they didn’t it would be bad”, I have some really, really bad news for you about the world.

If this was thought through by a capable adult, it would’t be implemented at all. The very fact that this solution is on the table is proof of the breakdown of rational thought. Or more likely, greased palms.

Your blind appeal to authority would hold more water if we haven’t already seen national adoption of AI products in emergency services that that have catastrophically failed to perform their basic functions, leading to real world harm. Audits of Flock cameras deployed in several cities found an error rate ranging from 33-70%. People are being arrested for things they didn’t do because the AI doesn’t work and nobody cares. People are being stalked because nobody thought of basic security controls.

We're talking about an AI implementation, not some rigid set of if...elsestatements.

Even worse, we’re talking about an AI implementation of if…else statements. Regular if else statements are consistent. As soon as you throw AI into the mix they become unpredictable. You introduce a failure mode that didn’t exist before that can and will have real consequences.

Why does it have to be AI? Why can't it be "press 1 for the highway car fire on 42, press 2 to be transferred to an operator"? Surely that's much less likely to fail?

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.