this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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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.