New Orleans Becomes First Major U.S. City To Let AI Answer 911

One of the scariest places I ever visited was New Orleans.  My girlfriend at the time booked our stay at an old traditional second floor house in the French Quarter.  The first night, I kept hearing ominous noises....someone coming up the steps, voices.  I demanded that we leave the next am and we moved to a  Hilton.  Something is very creepy about that place.  It does not surprise me that AI would be rolled out there to a greater degree. 

New Orleans is testing just how much Americans are willing to trust artificial intelligence when the stakes are considerably higher than writing an email or ordering dinner, according to the New York Post.

The city has begun allowing an AI system to field certain 911 calls, apparently making it the first major U.S. municipality to put a bot directly between emergency callers and human operators.

The idea is largely about volume. New Orleans' emergency communications center receives more than 1,000 calls on a typical day, and officials believe automation can clear some of the clutter while dispatchers concentrate on genuine emergencies.

The technology isn't supposed to take over the entire 911 operation. Instead, it can deal with situations that appear redundant or relatively routine when human operators are tied up. A flood of calls about the same already-reported car accident, for example, could potentially be filtered through the automated system rather than occupying multiple dispatchers.

The Post writes that city officials insist humans remain at the center of the operation. But skeptics say emergency calls are precisely the kind of messy, unpredictable interactions computers may struggle to interpret.