NFPA Journal - Spring 2024 - 29

in other ways as well. What if a fire department is
presented with a novel situation where multiple outliers
coalesce to create a disaster without precedent?
Could the AI tool, using existing data or even information
gleaned from textbooks, provide an incident
commander with useful guidance?
" AI is planning for the bell curve. It's planning
for the middle 66 percent of the situation, but our
emergency services live at the fringes, " Bassi said,
paraphrasing a panel member from the December
event. " How does a model built to take away the mundane
tasks and address the everyday begin to address
what emergency services actually does? "
These data quality issues are not exclusive to the
fire service. According to experts, one of the main
obstacles that may prevent AI tools from maximizing
their usefulness for life safety applications center
around data access. As in many industries, huge
quantities of data in the life safety world-from insurers,
device manufacturers, installers and maintainers,
private researchers, and other entities-is proprietary
and closely held. That dynamic could severely limit
the amount of data available to train AI tools in a
number of fire and life safety applications, and ultimately
make its reliability much weaker.
Another existential question that the fire safety community
is grappling with is the potential that these
AI tools could eventually put firefighters, engineers,
installers, and designers out of work. Whether those
concerns are warranted, nobody knows for sure, but
opinions are abundant and run the gamut.
Some AI advocates claim these tools won't cost
any fire and life safety jobs, in large part because
the number of skilled tradespeople, including code
officers, is rapidly shrinking as workers age into
retirement and not enough younger people are rising
to take their place. On top of that, AHJs including city
building departments are already struggling to find
enough staff to keep up with permitting, observers
say. The argument is that AI tools will allow the staff
that AHJs do have to approve permits much more
efficiently, freeing them to conduct more inspections
of buildings and construction sites as well as other
tasks that can benefit safety.
Other experts, including Xinyan, argue that AI will
eventually lead to a shrinking workforce, at least in
the private sector. " I think for the consulting companies,
as long as these tools can save them manpower,
they will have a big motivation to use them, " he said.
" If someone tells a company, 'Hey, you can reduce
30 percent of your engineers if you use this AI tool,' I
think every company will adopt it because, honestly,
software is much cheaper than humans. "
Early adopters such as Chief David Povlitz in Arlington
are adamant that AI tools can never replace the
knowledge and decision making of actual firefighters.
During an interView, nearly every positive or
theoretical application he assigned to AI included
a caveat with caution and the need for human oversight.
If the data isn't sound, if the public isn't aware
and on board, if the excitement to use the technology
gets ahead of the safeguards to ensure its safe
application, things could go south fast, he said.
" We can't let the technology drive us-we have
to know where we want to go with it and how we
want to apply it, " he cautioned. " We just can't turn
the tool on and release it in our public safety ecosystems,
which affect critical infrastructure and critical
systems, without truly knowing some of its effects and
impacts. We can't just take our hands off the digital
wheel and say, 'the machine has all the answers.' "
JESSE ROMAN is senior editor of NFPA Journal and host
of The NFPA Podcast.
NFPA .ORG/JOURNAL * NFPA JOURNAL | 29
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NFPA Journal - Spring 2024

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