this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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.... WTF?
Did you read the article? It describes the situation in detail.
The situation is WTF.
What situation? AI is being used to transfer non-emergency calls away from the emergency lines, keeping the human operators there available to handle the actual emergencies. Non-emergency stuff shouldn't be on that line in the first place. The "WTF" part is people phoning the emergency number with trivialities in the first place, they shouldn't be doing that.
My parents worked for EMS. You DO NOT want to hand this over to AI.
EMS is not being handed over to AI. Please read the article, it's about using AI to triage non-emergency calls away from the emergency lines so that the human call staff at the emergency lines are not being kept busy dealing with the non-emergency stuff.
So they are asking a virtual roulette wheel to make the determination if it's an emergency or not.
Modern AI is not a "virtual roulette wheel."
And if you'll read the article, it mentions that they don't have enough staff to handle all the calls they're getting. They have job openings that people simply aren't applying for, it's not a question of funding. They're getting too many phone calls to handle and many of those phone calls should not be going to them in the first place. What should they do?
It's called capitalism. If you can't hire anyone, maybe the pay sucks.
It is exactly that. One may have a backtest. You'll see that real calls will be falsely detected.
What "modern AI" even means, you are arguing about taste of oysters with the people who have eaten them, unlike you.
Oh, of course you can't have a backtest with a proprietary centrally hosted model until it's deployed. Shit-shit-shit.
It is. Double the pay, see how many people there are. If still too few, double it again.
I'm certain it'll be less money wasted that on this bot done the lawful way, with proper compensations to victims and their families. We are not considering the situation where it's not.
Hire more operators.
Contact centers have not been invented yesterday, it's just plain bullshit this simple task is somehow hard today, when it has already been simplified far beyond what people in year 1977 dreamed about.
It's the actual job of the government, BTW, and not playing Caesar with real armies or playing Master of Orion with real systems.
Pay more and more people apply. Also fine folk for misuse of emergency number time.
If there's an insistence on AI for any reason, which almost always comes down to $$$, then have people transfer non emergency to the AI. First contact should be to a person 100% of the time.
You forgot the part where they’re also painfully understaffed. Automating things is not going to fix the issue.
I didn't forget that part. The article indicates that they have job openings that they are simply not getting applicants for. Throwing more money at staffing won't fix that, you can't magically spawn qualified people out of nothing.
I seem to be the only person in this thread who's actually reading and responding to the article, and every response I give instantly gets hit with downvotes. Do people simply want to be angry about AI, and so anything that might interfere with the purity of that anger is unwelcome? Maybe we should just have a daily thread with a title of simply "How about that AI, huh?" That people can post angry comments in without fear of meaningful interruption.
The one thing you forgot is that you are on Lemme. So of course everybody wants to be upset about AI. That's like par for the course.
Oh, I'm not forgetting I'm on Lemmy, I know I'm in a strongly anti-AI bubble here. I just think it's important for bubbles to be challenged, and this particular article seemed to be drawing a particularly strong knee-jerk reaction. I seem to have got a few people to actually read it, at least.
At the end of the day it's not like upvotes or downvotes here matter. These AI systems will get implemented or not based on real-world considerations, not whether it's popular in some particular niche online. It's just nice to keep informed.
SLC has a glut of qualified people that could staff these offices, the fact they only got a 4% COL raise this year tells you most of why they might have trouble keeping people. The COL of SLC has absolutely skyrocketed since 2019.
But that's actually besides the point, you know the real joke about this, they say there are 15 open positions, yet when you search for dispatch job postings, they don't list any, that's from their own site – only if you dig through SLC's specific job portal do you even find a single posting for dispatch.
Maybe they should spend less time on AI and more time trying to hire actual people.
Thank you for being the first person in this thread to actually go to any sort of effort to dig up factual counterarguments.
Just because you supposedly read the article, doesn’t dismiss our concerns.
No, but I think a minimal threshold for giving those concerns consideration should be some indication that the people with those concerns have read the article.
Glitchvid, for example, has actually gone to the trouble to search job listings on their site. That is a sign of concern worth considering. First one I've seen in this thread.
You have no proof that I had or hadn’t. So, it is my word against yours.