: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.
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.
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?
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.
how long could the queue be? If someone can’t wait 60 seconds for the queue, but can take the 8 seconds to ask if it’s about X incident. I do imagine it will be smart enough to check their approximate location before giving the prompt
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 the argument is that the probability of misclassifying an arbitrary segment of speech as the very particular answer “yes” is sufficiently low (with reasonably trained, current models) that we may ignore it under practical circumstances.
I find the non-zero probability of misclassifying in a little disquieting, but I suppose one way of looking at it is that this will probably increase the expected value of lives saved; the very probable case (calls are correctly filtered and a smaller proportion is passed through, allowing operators to respond to more new emergencies) may save a lot of lives, whereas the very improbable case (something that is not “yes” is misclassified as such) may endanger a few.
One thing that would worry me about just looking at expected values is the possibility of bias against a particular group of people or emergency type, but to me that seems unlikely in this case.
Edit: it also just occurred to me that if you are woefully unfortunate, you can probably just call again if you accept the assumption that there is a high probability the answer is yes given the model classified it as such. It might be more or less random chance?
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.
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.
I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans’), they were overworked. ↩︎
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Pretty safe? I am sorry but if it is your life on the line or a loved one pretty safe is just not going to cut it. When the AI decides your dying grandmother isn’t priority because of a reason no one can explain or audit what them.This is a huge safety issue than you hand wave away because you are apparently enamored with AI.
I am trying to keep an open mind but replacing human thinking in emergency situations is not a reasonable application. You want a LLM model to triage your medical care with an unproven model that can and does make serious mistakes?
This is not speculation. These companies are selling snake oil at this point and you act as their carnival barker. I do think that decades in the future these systems will be ready for these challenges, but I am not insane enough to believe this roll out is anything other than a cash grab at this point.
I find your statement that humans don’t like giving up control very disturbing. We obviously do give up control for routine low level things like GPS everyday. This is not what your are alluding to though. You are advocating for giving up a higher level of control to an algorithm that can’t be held accountable.
Maybe you are ready for a world of half baked customer agents, managers, counselors, architects, artists, doctors, teachers, judges, emergency dispatchers, etc but I am not. Ceding our control to a corporatocracy of profit driven yes men is not going to end well.
I’ll keep it simple and based on the article in question:
Right now, people who need help are waiting longer to talk to an operator becauase operators field lots of calls about large incidents (or well-witnessed incidents).
That’s causing harm RIGHT NOW.
The theory is that if you offer callers a way to NOT TAKE UP OPERATOR TIME for incidents that are known, then the people who need help talk to an operator faster and get help faster.
That is what the article presents as what they’re doing.
: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.
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
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
After implementing this tech
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs ↩︎
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?
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.
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.
how long could the queue be? If someone can’t wait 60 seconds for the queue, but can take the 8 seconds to ask if it’s about X incident. I do imagine it will be smart enough to check their approximate location before giving the prompt
:sigh: Okay, I’ll try to break it down even more…
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:
WITH the triage tech:
They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.
None of that applies if a caller just can’t get through at all because the bot mistook “no” for “yes”
I believe the argument is that the probability of misclassifying an arbitrary segment of speech as the very particular answer “yes” is sufficiently low (with reasonably trained, current models) that we may ignore it under practical circumstances.
I find the non-zero probability of misclassifying in a little disquieting, but I suppose one way of looking at it is that this will probably increase the expected value of lives saved; the very probable case (calls are correctly filtered and a smaller proportion is passed through, allowing operators to respond to more new emergencies) may save a lot of lives, whereas the very improbable case (something that is not “yes” is misclassified as such) may endanger a few.
One thing that would worry me about just looking at expected values is the possibility of bias against a particular group of people or emergency type, but to me that seems unlikely in this case.
Edit: it also just occurred to me that if you are woefully unfortunate, you can probably just call again if you accept the assumption that there is a high probability the answer is yes given the model classified it as such. It might be more or less random chance?
I have to agree with you one hundred, /u/percent
:)
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.
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.
I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans’), they were overworked. ↩︎
This is Lemmy and it says AI. Expect nobody to read and for panties to twist so hard their legs come off.
As I replied to a similar comment, in fairness - my panties came off as well. hehe (but for a valid reason, dammit! :slams fist on desk:)
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.
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. :)
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
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. :)
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.
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….”
sensationalized headlines aren’t new. If anything they’re more important now than ever
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.
So, Lemmy really seems to love these two things:
If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?
Also worth noting that I got angry at things AND had my biases confirmed. ;-)
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.
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?
I fucking well did.
Try reading all of my fucking comment then.
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.
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.
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!
Pretty safe? I am sorry but if it is your life on the line or a loved one pretty safe is just not going to cut it. When the AI decides your dying grandmother isn’t priority because of a reason no one can explain or audit what them.This is a huge safety issue than you hand wave away because you are apparently enamored with AI.
I am trying to keep an open mind but replacing human thinking in emergency situations is not a reasonable application. You want a LLM model to triage your medical care with an unproven model that can and does make serious mistakes?
https://www.foley.com/p/102ixtc/stanford-study-finds-high-percentage-of-errors-using-large-language-models-in-leg/
This is not speculation. These companies are selling snake oil at this point and you act as their carnival barker. I do think that decades in the future these systems will be ready for these challenges, but I am not insane enough to believe this roll out is anything other than a cash grab at this point.
I find your statement that humans don’t like giving up control very disturbing. We obviously do give up control for routine low level things like GPS everyday. This is not what your are alluding to though. You are advocating for giving up a higher level of control to an algorithm that can’t be held accountable.
Maybe you are ready for a world of half baked customer agents, managers, counselors, architects, artists, doctors, teachers, judges, emergency dispatchers, etc but I am not. Ceding our control to a corporatocracy of profit driven yes men is not going to end well.
I’ll keep it simple and based on the article in question:
Right now, people who need help are waiting longer to talk to an operator becauase operators field lots of calls about large incidents (or well-witnessed incidents).
That’s causing harm RIGHT NOW.
The theory is that if you offer callers a way to NOT TAKE UP OPERATOR TIME for incidents that are known, then the people who need help talk to an operator faster and get help faster.
That is what the article presents as what they’re doing.
Everything you are saying is pure speculation.
You may well be right. We’ll see.
Daddy chill
Just as long as you acknowledge the proper parental relationship here, son.
lol :P