Could AI Answer Your Next 911 Call?

You’re running. Someone is trying to kill you. Your chest feels tight and you can barely breathe as you step into an alley to hide. You pull out your phone with a trembling hand and struggle to dial 911 as your sweaty fingers make streaks on its surface. You press the dial button and prepare to whisper to the dispatcher, when you hear an artificial voice say, “What’s your emergency?”

This is the dream being conceived of in New Orleans, where the plan to use AI to answer and rate 911 calls is about to become a reality. Only after the AI is ‘convinced’ of your urgency would you get to speak to a human. Other calls would be dealt with entirely by the machine.

New Orleans has one of the highest 911 call volumes in the country, so advocates of this plan are highlighting efficiency and improved call routing. They may even be right. But what we gain in the practical can have a human cost that is not easily quantifiable.

Let us be clear: 911 operators are sometimes the last voice that some poor soul hears before he or she dies. Whether a person is suffering from a heart attack, has been in a car accident, or is actively under attack, 911 operators are a lifeline in more than one way. Yes, fundamentally, they are there to send first responders to a scene. But the secondary function matters too—they represent a “person on the end of the phone.” That’s a phrase that would have no real emotional meaning to an AI bot, but it means something to all of us.

In a manner that is challenging to articulate but no less real, there is a comfort in knowing that the other person knows what it is to suffer—to panic, grieve, and to feel desperate. By the very nature of being human, we share in suffering.

Remember the groan that you exhale when calling a company and being greeted by a robotic menu that serves as a firewall against a fast resolution? The very antithesis of that is the warmth that is possible when someone in desperation calls for help and reaches a human. It’s true—a person on the other end of the phone in a crisis isn’t enough, but it’s something. It matters to be heard, not merely to be siphoned through algorithmic prioritization.

As a society and community, we should care enough to want people to be accompanied in their darkest moments, even imperfectly. Not every 911 dispatcher is wonderful, but at least we leave space for human goodness by having dispatchers who know what it is to struggle. It is impossible to calculate and explain the human cost of letting people die while being accompanied by what is essentially a voicemail box, but we ought to shudder at what it says about us if we allow it.

On the more practical level: people pick up subtleties that a machine simply cannot. There have been numerous publicized cases of domestic violence calls in which the victim calls in a large pizza order. The operator understood what was happening, took the address, and sent police. Would AI? The bot could, of course, be trained to understand that lingo and respond accordingly, but what about the first time? The first operator who took that original call wasn’t trained that pizza would be used as a code word for help, but he could hear a panicked voice and intuited that something was very wrong. It is the nuances like that that we cannot replace.

So many of the areas that are being filled with AI are holes where we had gross inefficiencies and redundancies. Tasks that are monotonous and dulling to the senses are undoubtedly some of the best to be filled by emerging technologies. Yet we must pause before placing any computer where a soul is needed instead.

We’re a bit confounded by this notion because we rarely talk (or think) in those terms nowadays, especially in the corporate world. We think of employees completing tasks that must get done, not as people who have souls that ought to be acknowledged. But both can be true. The most valid critiques of mega corporations center around the reduction of human beings to merely workers. It is a tragic reality that we ought to work to change.

As we attempt to reorder society using newer technologies, we must remember that people are not mere data sets that need to be handled according to efficiencies and economic effectiveness. There is more to us than that, and as such, we should make sure that those who suffer in their most vulnerable moments don’t do so alone.