Posted by champagnepapi 1 day ago
This makes sense.
I lived for several years in New Orleans, behind Wagner's in the Bywater. In 2022, it was ranked the 8th most dangerous city in the world. The gunfire was constant. Anyone who knows that corner knows the Family Dollar was so riddled with bullet holes that they eventually stopped repairing them. I'd be enjoying my morning coffee in my backyard, sitting on my bench with the neighbor's calico meowing at me, when fully automatic gunfire would ring out. I'd go to the Facebook group page, where people with military or gun experience would identify the type and caliber of the weapons involved. Then came the pictures of people's cars sprayed with bullet holes, and a story about someone lying in bed when a bullet whizzed over them and hit the opposite wall.
That intersection has cameras everywhere! The police already know what happened. If someone wasn't murdered it would hours before they would come out and look.
When I first moved there I lived in mid-city by 12 Mile Limit. Before I arrived, there was a triple homicide. Then there was a double homicide. The building on the corner had video of everything. They ended up towing the owner of the building's truck because it was evidence. She went to the impound to get it back because the bullet hole was from the previous triple homicide.
During these incidents, which are often (getting better over the last couple years), hundreds or thousands of people can hear them. The sound of fully automatic guns can carry for blocks. Being able to handle all the calls focusing on the few that arrive first likely will improve the service.
Given you lived there for years, like how do you do that, staying there for so long? I'd avoid a place like that if I even thought stuff like that was going on there in the first place, but if I ever ended up in a place like that anyway, one instance of that happening would make me leave and move away from there immediately, anything is better than experiencing stuff like that even once, even less twice or more.
There lives a ton of people in New Orleans, I'm guessing most of them are also as jaded/used to it as you? It's really hard for me to comprehend how so many people just get used to such constant needless violence around them, it sounds like a war zone to me, and people just... go to work and live a generally happy life while that just happens often? It's so foreign to me, and you write so casually about it, and people stay there?!
While not great, it's not "dodging bullets every day". New Orleans is also experiencing their lowest rate of homicide in years.
On one hand, my accented English could be misunderstood. On the other hand, some of the more advanced systems might actually be able to recognize that I’m speaking Japanese right away, whereas a human operator may first have to figure out what language I’m speaking.
Considering that if I’m calling 911, I’m probably going to be panicked or at least dealing with something urgent, that could be one area where I see a real advantage.
A lot of LLM-based systems seem to be pretty good at detecting and handling many different languages, at least.
I don't remember from prior articles if at that point you just stay on the line, or if you need to press a button. It is not going through an AI voice call tree.
That said, wrongful death / negligence is typically suable and many policies already cover that.
They're new. We'll see if it works out. (Just did a quick search and there are some other new entrants too. Just found out about Testudo: https://www.testudo.co/)
At the same time traditional insurers are doing the opposite and limiting/removing liability from AI: https://www.ft.com/content/abfe9741-f438-4ed6-a673-075ec177d... (archive link: https://archive.is/ZfWyd)
The article says it's basically to handle high call volumes maybe during some kind of widespread incident. But in those cases why would AI even be needed- if calls are flooding in for something and people need to be put on hold why do you need AI to ask them if they are calling about incident x? Just automate a voice for that and ask them that while they're on hold / when the system first picks up.
This smells like a bandaid over an underfunded system, and a way to sneak in further cost-cutting in the future where the real calls will be actually answered by AI.
I believe there are studies that indicate this to be true, however.
Ironically, only dumb people would draw conclusions from these rage bait "studies". I'm trying to stay open-minded, but these are incredibly unserious papers that just serve Luddite agenda.
If someone has something more convincing than 2% statistical significance of n=40 people clicking mouse slightly slower I'm all ears.
Today, the purpose of AI is not to get a machine to do your job, it's to look good enough to persuade your boss to sack you and split your salary between the boss and the AI company.
And how did that work out of them? People conveniently ignore that part of history which seems to clearly indicate that outright destruction rarely leads to progress. With AI, I'd argue that we have much more opportunity to steer than to destroy, and the latter is not even a viable option so - why even entertain it at all? It's just raging for raging sake.
Ultimately, the factory owners asked their rich and powerful friends in government to help them out, and they started having show trials and executing anyone who impinged on factory owners' rights to make out like bandits.
If the Luddites made a mistake, it was in breaking the machines when they could've broken the owners. That would make the next set of owners a little more considerate of the human cost of their enrichment.
If we manage to automate thought so it can atrophy (and, I think we're on the way), intelligence will go the same way as physical strength.
We don't mourn the end of muscles.
It's sort of like exercise: it used to be required and unavoidable (you had to walk to get anywhere), now it's optional so most people don't do it with anywhere near enough regularity or intensity.
When you delegate demands, you reallocate your resources.
If I'm raking leaves all day I eventually reach diminishing returns. My arms might even start to get tired and actually make me lose skill. Now I got a leaf raking robot which is not perfect but does 50% of the job and gives me free time to recover my hands and research new leaf raking techniques, maybe even invest into a leaf blower. Did I not become better at raking leaves?
People are not calculators - all these simplistic takes are frankly insulting to human capability.
Have you never had to learn a new language or a music instrument? AI can just translate a text into your native language, or tell you how the sentence should be built, but you have to actually actively engage with the low level process of trying to do yourself all the little boring things, a lot, for a long time, to develop the intuition and expertise
And actually, grinding the exact same chord over and over can improve your music. You won’t become a grandiose composer, and even unlikely to become a descent musician from that alone, but you will definitely evolve from a messy play to something more comfortable over time. And likely get ideas and motivation for what to do next.
I really don’t think AI tools are good to use as a non expert, they nudge you away from meaningful engagement
It does if you are still learning fingerings. Repetition absolutely helps build skill.
Would you argue an athlete standing on a mark and practicing the same shot over and over is not improving their skill?
Only in a sense which is obviously not at all what's being discussed. If you hire a personal chef, have you gotten better at cooking? What about a nanny, have you gotten better at raising your children?
Of course automating some cognitive processes can free your time for other, more fulfilling aspects. But there's certainly no guarantee that that's the case.
> People are not calculators - all these simplistic takes are frankly insulting to human capability.
Funny example. Which do you think is more common, people who are innumerate because they believe using a calculator is sufficient, or people who are highly numerate and believe learning arithmetic was a waste of time?
Likely yes, as you learn cooking now only by repeatedly cutting carrots the same way you always did but expanding your horizons to new cooking techniques and socializing in the niche will yield much bigger growth.
This Bruce Lee level misconception of "practice the same kick for a thousand times" is extremely outdated perspective on how people actually progress effectively.
Same way you learn anything well - with balance and diversity. You kick, go for a walk, rest, watch youtube, get kicked by other people, talk about kicking on a kicking fans forum.
The point is that you can learn faster and be better with AI tools as you can choose when to kick and when you have space for all of those other activities that will still train your kick.
Not only that, but this clearly seems like superior human condition where we get to choose our actions rather than be pigeon-held into kicking 8 hours a day. I'm a better programmer now that I can choose not to refactor python for 3 days even though after that I'd surely learn all library APIs by heart. Instead, I can spend 1 day working on initial refactor somewhat learning the APIs and have LLMs take over the rest while I spend other 2 days on other new tasks.
I think the confusion here is people assuming that if option of not doing thing exists then people will stop doing it and regress which is a real danger but it's one that can be solved for rather easily. I'd be willing to wager that in 5–20 years we'll have more domain experts than fewer.
You are not engaging in good faith. Obviously the point of the argument is that if you hire a personal chef, you are outsourcing the actual cooking and investing little to no time yourself on improving at cooking. Interpreting it as having more freedom to cook, and your contractor providing a service being your friend/teacher, is absurd.
And even in your contrived hypothetical, there's two basic issues. First, mastery can be highly specialized. Second, if you only ever did the trivial and repetitive to begin with, you never intended to improve.
> This Bruce Lee level misconception of "practice the same kick for a thousand times" is extremely outdated perspective on how people actually progress effectively.
This is another straw man. Nobody is promoting this meme that the only thing you need for self-improvement is mindless repetition. That doesn't even make sense, considering the actual topic is thinking for yourself instead of only using AI. The point is you can't get better at something without actually practicing, and "difficult" or "tedious" doesn't equate to "unimportant."
I think there’s also an aspect of accountability-washing: when regular 911 makes mistakes, managers and politicians get hauled into the spotlight to explain the failure (my city has that now due to the outgoing mayor’s decision to put an unqualified crony in charge). I will bet that the first time this fails badly it’ll be blame shifting and assurances that some huge tech company has fixed the problem and it’ll never happen again, with as little talk about oversight responsibility as they can get away with.
Any time a local government fails people these same kinds of incentive misalignments are at the real heart of it.
The fact that it has the word AI in it just gives it that cool cyberpunk dystopian sheen, where you call 911 and the AI says something about mechahitler instead of trying to help you.
conclusion: have emergency protocols where you can staff your call centers appropriately
Is this criteria satisfied if we swap the titular “AI” with our inoffensive “automating the voice”?
Otherwise I can code this state machine condition for you in 10 minutes.
I don't get why are people so against cost cutting and use of AI in government services?
So much of my tax money is already wasted on bullshit. If you are in Europe - it's majority of your work, being set on fire by bureaucrats.
I really don't understand that concern... So you have either a STT-LLM-TTS or fully native speech model that is instructed to answer calls. When does it generate an analysis? Are you giving the agent some tools to generate the analysis ? Maybe don't.
Also, in general I feel like training some classifier would be slightly better from a humanitary point of view, but I agree that in general reducing the work load of overworked public workers should be a priority of AI application.
But reading about how it's supposed to work:
> This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it's no, then the callers are transferred to a human.
Couldn't a human resolve such thing themselves in about 3 seconds? "911, Hello, do you have an emergency?", "No I was wondering abo...", "Ok, redirecting your call now <BEEP>", why do they have to add a slow and infallible AI model here?
Similarly, I worked on a system that used AI for approvals of payment for medical activities (in Germany) - it only could fail in favour of the patient (approving when a human would disapprove), thus the ethical issue was fear that reduced workload would cause layoffs for the unionized approvers.
"can handle" doing a lot of lifting. Sounds silly, but even getting 1% of the redirections wrong sounds absolutely horrible. Fine, use AI for taking table reservations or whatever, but not when literal lives are at stake, like receiving calls from people with their partner dangerously hurt, they're panicking and are trying to get emergency services to come.
I know this may be a very poor proxy for reality, but from all the US true crime Netflix/Youtube videos I've seen over the years, it seems like there is a boatload of emergency call takers out there that are very bad at picking up the details from the caller.
I'm wondering if this is a thing similar to self driving cars, where people drastically overestimate the current baseline that humans are providing, and where automated systems are mainly not implemented due to liability reasons.
Honestly that's why it needs to both have strict liabilities on operators/developers (no more "computer said so but computer can't be held liable"), as well as what I mentioned in my example - the failure paths should always go for reliable channel, including connecting to a human simply if it cannot gauge the answer with high enough certainty
You don’t need ‘AI’ for this really - all it needs is a prerecorded message asking that question and if the caller presses a button it continues. Or if they don’t respond for N seconds it puts them through to an operator. I guess you could use the AI to record that message ahead of time if they really have to, but it doesn’t need to be running in real time responding to people.
We’ve had stuff like this in the UK for years now to do this to prevent accidental dialling (where it will stop to ask “you are calling XYZ service” please confirm, kind of thing)
This actually seems better with very little overhead. I'd very much prefer hearing a human recording than AI bot.
Why use something as error-prone as an AI for this simple task? I hope they at least add a "Press 1 for Yes, 2 for no" as a backup.