Contributing Editor
Erin Walsh is a contributing editor at Mast Dispatch and a researcher in applied human factors and emergency communications. She writes about dispatcher cognition, alert fatigue, automation bias, and the operational risks of poorly designed AI systems. Her work focuses on how technology interacts with the human side of the console—how interface design, decision support tools, and AI recommendations affect call-taker judgment under stress.
AI tools in 911 are often described as “assistive,” but what that actually means isn’t always clear. In practice, the most successful deployments treat human involvement not as a safeguard of last resort, but as a core d...