I don't know how I'd react if I called 112/911 in an emergency and it was obviously a AI generated voice picking up. Add in the potential for misunderstandings during a situation like this, and my head might just explode on the spot if any misunderstanding happened.

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?

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p_l 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because a computer can handle 100s of such calls simultaneously.

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.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

> Because a computer can handle 100s of such calls simultaneously.

"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.

	▲	p_l an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I agree it does a lot of heavy lifting there. 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

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TOMDM 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In a situation where you don't have enough people, keeping them on this task takes up someone who could be processing people, people who may be panicking too much to quickly give a yes/no.