According to António Pombeiro, Deputy Secretary-General of the Internal Administration, who spoke to journalists on 20 June in Porto, “if the pilot project goes well, we are prepared to start using the system to answer calls as of 2025.”
Currently, we are facing “a very recent technology”, and there is the “need to do many tests”, admitting that for now we are “very much in the unknown”, so the operation of the pilot project will be key.
“In certain situations, we have waiting periods due to the great amount of calls. This happens when there are incidents that involve a lot of publicity, a lot of people watching what is happening and everyone has the initiative to call 112”, said António Pombeiro, giving the example of urban fires.
I’m not opposed to technology or progress. If the task I’m calling about can be easily automated then it should be available to do online, and if it’s online, I’ll do it every time on there. But companies are more and more using forcing phone calls and horrible automated systems to discourage people from doing things they don’t want them to do (requesting a refund, cancelling an account, making a complaint) in the hopes that the experience will be so discouraging that they’ll give up. It’s literally a dark pattern.
Besides which, if the problems are that straight forward and easy to automate, machine learning is entirely unnecessary for dealing with them.
I think you’re being quite naive about how developments in this area could make our lives significantly worse.