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Comment by calepayson | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree in situations where folks have access to an advice nurse. Always prioritize an expert over an llm.

Same goes for the others, if you have the means I think you should get a tutor or an editor as well.

However, if you’re choosing between nothing and an llm then the llm starts to become a great option.

I used to work rescue and if I had caught one of my coworkers asking an llm how to treat a patient I would have flipped.

But if I had rolled up to an incident and some Good Samaritan was trying to help out by using an llm that would be awesome!

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Most first aid can be broken down very basically.

Call a professional for help. Are they breathing, is their heart beating, are they bleeding.

If you haven’t called someone that can actually save the persons life no amount of first aid will help.

Unfortunately unless something is obviously preventing breathing as someone untrained theres not a lot you can do if they aren’t breathing.

Heart beating is pretty easy, chest compressions…

Bleeding again, pressure, and a lot of it to try to prevent the bleeding.

I would want to check what an AI response is to some situations but as long as it just tackles those cases it can probably only do more good than harm.

Id be more worried some good samaritan would start cutting people to try to “get an airway” or some nonsense. That would significantly increase mortality rates…

My time in rescue gave me a ton a faith in good samaritans. To try to do something in an emergency is productive 99% of the time (imo).

The only case I've experienced where it wasn’t was when someone in our area was actively listening in in emergency channels and trying to preempt ambulances. The issue was that they had training in the basics but often went past that in care they provided. Something that I believe is not covered by Good Samaritan laws.

I’m much more worried about folks like that than people who find themselves in an emergency and are trying to help.

I'd rather see a Good Samaritan being talked through CPR or whatever by a dispatcher who's trained to give that advice over the phone, rather than having a hallucinating LLM tell them to do something deadly.

I believe the situation here is more a matter of they don’t have a dispatcher to guide them.

In some rural area of Africa they came across a car crash. Two people hop out and assist while a third drives off to notify someone to send emergency help.

An on device LLM might be very useful there depending on what it says…

If the LLM tells the untrained passer-by to do a tracheotomy, it's not going to go well.

Emergencies can freak people out but not once in my eight years in rescue have I ever encountered a scenario where a random bystander might do as drastic of an intervention as as a tracheotomy.

I have shown up at scenes where people have googled what to do though and, you know what, it was super helpful.

If someone is dumb enough to perform a tracheotomy because an llm, google, or a passerby told them to. The issue isn’t any of those factors. That person is just so incredibly dumb as to be a danger to everyone around them.

I've been a firefighter for 22 years. I'm sure neither of us will ever cease to be amazed at what otherwise intelligent people will do when they're in a panic.

People also do amazingly dumb things because a piece of software with a tone of authority told them to do it, even when they're not under duress. Look at the number of people who find themselves stranded or dead because they uncritically followed the directions of a navigation app, and who weren't in a panic state when they did it.

Me too!

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