
High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True - 127001brewer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/emergency-response-disaster-technology.html
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arkades
> Our mission is not to make money only,” Mr. Wani said, later adding, “We’re
> trying to save the world.”

People should probably watch Silicon Valley before giving interviews.
Repeating satire verbatim isn’t a good look.

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ihuman
But isn't emergency response literally about saving people?

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JetSpiegel
Is One Concern responding to emergencies, or sucking up a quarter million
dollars a year in funding to paint a map using "AI"? That's a lot of actual
boots on the ground, saving people.

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127001brewer
_“We really think we can enable a disaster-free future.”_

That statement gave me pause since it's quite the unrealistic claim to make.

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q_queue
I think it's reckless to make claims like this even with genuinely useful
technology because it triggers the "Arrogant engineers think tech is the
answer to everything" response which leads to people in other fields
dismissing things out of hand that could actually be worthwhile.

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40acres
For one, it’s great to see startups tackling hard problems like this:
generally I believe there is huge benefit and opportunity for startups in
providing government services like this. It certainly helps to dispel the
feeling that our brightest minds are working on ads.

Secondly, this really seems like the initial phases of product development and
fit — agencies would be foolish to simply rely on a startup like this to
coordinate 100% of disaster response, I’m sure FEMA has similar models. With
startups, especially ones tackling more “serious” domains (for lack of a
better word) I’m willing to have a longer leash and proceed with caution.

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ianburrell
"One Concern’s earthquake simulations rely on FEMA’s free damage-prediction
method known as P58".

It may not be AI, but combining data sources and predictions. Which is useful
but not world changing.

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neilv
Quote from article:

> _Ivan Porto Carrero, who oversaw a team of engineers at One Concern, said he
> was fired in June after speaking out against what he viewed as a company
> culture of dishonesty. He said the usual start-up attitude of “fail fast and
> try something new” was inappropriate to apply to disaster response because,
> “If you fail fast, people die.”_

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tsss
I can already see how something like this will further increase inequality due
to unaccounted biases in the training data, for example worse no emergency
response in black neighborhoods because there is less data about them.

The question is whether this bias is better than just relying on government
agencies, which we know are absolutely infested with racists and fascists.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Wow. "AI" and emergencies are such a bad fit. ML is great at probably being
almost right. That's not how you want to run critical systems.

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polynomial
Turns out, humans are also pretty good at probably being almost right. Luckily
though, they've figured out how to build systems with higher fault tolerance
than their own.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
It's easy for an ML model to do great in the average case but horribly in the
worst case, so you're correct if "fault tolerance" is a simple loss function
to be minimized, but wrong if "fault tolerance" actually means what we care
about. That's much harder and not something we uniformly know how to do with
ML. Like the costco example in the article.

To do that with ML, they'd need a loss function that captures what we care
about and data it sounds like they don't have.

We _do_ know how to build systems with high fault tolerance the old fashioned
non "AI" way.

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Dowwie
My experience with disaster response is a month in Louisiana helping to
operate the Rapides Coliseum shelter managed by the American Red Cross after
hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Those who are resourceful, can solve problems creatively, and take initiative
will lead a disaster response while those granted rank and position tend to
spin wheels and control a situation they don't understand. Disasters aren't
responded to by staff employees with adequate training. If it's a major
disaster, people who have never worked together nor acted in such a capacity
are loosely organized together and used to channel resources and effort to
victims and their families. Technology absolutely plays a vital role in
disaster response but at times it can be a major hindrance. I recall when
agents of FEMA came to the coliseum, they asked where the computers and
network were. The location did have them, unlike others, but over time they
went down and no one has available to maintain them. I explained to the agents
that they will have to use forms and manual entry the old fashioned way. They
just looked at each other and left. Several days passed. Then, FEMA returned
with a mobile command center, featuring computers and satellite communication.

The experience didn't surprise me but made me realize how dependent people are
on technology and how unprepared they are to handle circumstances they haven't
trained for.

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blendo
"In classes that fall, Mr. Wani and other graduate students turned the problem
into a project. Using crowdsourced ground-shaking reports from previous
earthquakes, they trained a computer system to predict the areas of greatest
impact so that responders would not have to rely on 911 calls."

After a major earthquake, I seriously doubt competent emergency dispatch
operators will be proactively sending critically-understaffed ambulances, fire
engines, and police to a location identified by old, crowd-sourced cell phone
shake data cobbled together for a grad-school project.

Not that emergency systems IT is not without challenges: old (often third
party) technology, overly stove-piped administrative domains, and just plain
old out-of-date technical skills. In other words, there's lots of low hanging
fruit for bright young programmers looking to serve their community!

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jvanderbot
anyone up for a relevant xkcd?

[https://xkcd.com/2128/](https://xkcd.com/2128/)

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AWildC182
Spent some time around the CMU robotics labs in the mid 2000s. This is way
more real than most can imagine...

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jvanderbot
I review proposals all the time and this is still standard language.

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asfarley
Disaster-response is to robotics, as Lenna is to computer vision

