Ford execs say they made a mistake when they replaced human engineers with AI

[sajohnson]

Quote:

"In last year's JD Power Quality Survey, an annual study that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership, Ford finished 10th among mainstream brands and scored below the industry average. But this year, JD Power ranked the automaker as the top mainstream brand, placing it above the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ford attributed this massive improvement directly to the expertise of these returned engineers."

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[dbbii]

Where I'm encountering AI is in customer service. It's becoming very difficult to actually talk to a live person to resolve a problem. Biggest example so far is Frontier Communications. If you have a phone/internet problem, the only way to get it resolved is to say cancel service. That gets you to a live person. You still end up canceling because that person can't get ahold of anyone either to resolve an issue.

 

[MavGeek]

Where I'm encountering AI is in customer service. It's becoming very difficult to actually talk to a live person to resolve a problem. Biggest example so far is Frontier Communications. If you have a phone/internet problem, the only way to get it resolved is to say cancel service. That gets you to a live person. You still end up canceling because that person can't get ahold of anyone either to resolve an issue.

After sales service has become non-existent.

We, as consumers, need to strike back hard where it hurts them the most.

 

[sajohnson]

After sales service has become non-existent.

We, as consumers, need to strike back hard where it hurts them the most.

That's becoming difficult to do, since most corporations have been sucked into the race to the bottom.

What I do is read 1-star reviews and BBB complaints first, looking for customer service issues.

 

[MavGeek]

That's becoming difficult to do, since most corporations have been sucked into the race to the bottom.

What I do is read 1-star reviews and BBB complaints first, looking for customer service issues.

Harder, but not impossible. For instance, vehicles, computers, etc. are becoming more reliable and last longer. Therefore, I don’t need to buy a new one as often. My choice is based on who I feel is looking out for me the most. If you don’t stand up for your product you lose my business…..forever. I have no problem walking away from any corporation.

 

[jmatchco]

I've been seeing this story a lot. Companies are backtracking on AI because they realized that humans were actually cheaper than the tokens needed to replace them. My company's clients are all pushing back on AI, arguing that the RFP requires human involvement.

Sorry, in my world RFP meant Request For Proposals. Is that your meaning? Are you seeing RFPs requiring human replies?

 

[MaverickDragon]

AI is garbage, a huge waste of money and electricity, who didn’t see that coming?

Obviously I didn't, as noted in my tagline...

 

[d7602002]

I think AI is good for some stuff. Maybe like questions that aren't life and death. Math problems like, one train leaves new York at 5p, heading west, traveling at 50 mph, another train leaves Los Angeles on the same track four hours later heading east traveling at 60 mph .. When will they collide killing everyone on board? Stuff like that, but not for doing jobs.

 

[El Kabong]

AI is no steamroller, it’s a useful tool that is useless without humans.

Bingo.

I worked in healthcare for 30 years. AI is doing some cool things like helping radiologists to dig deeper to save time. It might, for instance, see something on a CT scan that requires much more effort and time. It can then flag the radiologist to take a look. BTW, there is a huge shortage of radiologists and they have to read hundreds of scans a day. In the end though, it’s the human that makes the call as it should be.
Many complained jumped the gun and thought it was goi g to save them billions. They were wrong and Ford is just one who is correctly admitting it made a mistake. Now they can say as it for what it is best at, a human assistant.

It's a tool like any other. The healthcare stuff is neat, healthcare was an early adopter of AI for patient workflows (spent decades working in angio/CT/MR dev labs, watched it happen).

It *can* be used to save a lot of effort and time (both of which are money in business), no differently than any other tool (think statistical analysis done by hand on paper vs. using compute power).

But it's a powerful tool and unfortunately can be used for evil purposes too (which gets a lot of press). Of course there are things being done like https://ai4good.org/ e.g., in my neck of the woods the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/ai-for-good-research-lab/ has the https://microsoft.github.io/aiforgoodlab/resource.html?d=Building-Damage-Assessment-Toolkit-619169 which is - right now - being used to help with disaster response in Venezuela, but these efforts aren't profit-driven (yet, of course things can always shift towards monetization) and so are in great danger of abandonment.

We humans absolutely suck at being cooperative.

 

[MaverickDragon]

Agree. Asking AI to summarize a large PDF file is great. I've also been using it to proofread my papers for want of anyone I know willing to do it for me. But you can't simply ask AI to "design me a new Ford truck" and expect anything good out of it. AI is trained on what is. I can ask it, "What colors did the 1974 Mustang II come in?" and it'll give me a decent answer. It is not good at innovating what could be.

At the end of the day, AI is good at recognizing patterns and could replace some mindless, repetitive administrative tasks. There are always going to be some jobs that require a human to lay eyeballs on it. It's why I'm encouraging my daughter, who is about to start an accounting degree, to focus on the auditing side of things. The whole point of an audit is for a human to physically look at the records.

Sounds like good advice to your daughter.
In the way it has been deployed, it has turned customer service into a game of battle the robots.
Often, AI is great way to get a quick answer that you can't rely on, and obviously Ford paid for that mistake.

The basic problem with it, is that it is only as valid as the data it was fed.
It is artificial, but it is NOT intelligent.
It has no means of discerning the veracity of any answer, using anything approaching a human intellect's logic beyond observing details that may lead to a completely erroneous answer.

If you ask an AI module to describe the Earth, it is possible that you will be told it is flat, if more data indicates that then it being an oblate spheroid because significant input was provided by the Flat Earth Society.

 

[MaverickDragon]

I think AI is good for some stuff. Maybe like questions that aren't life and death. Math problems like, one train leaves new York at 5p, heading west, traveling at 50 mph, another train leaves Los Angeles on the same track four hours later heading east traveling at 60 mph .. When will they collide killing everyone on board? Stuff like that, but not for doing jobs.

What if the AI is driving the train?
Maybe it assumes the New Your train left Manhattan when it was actually leaving western New York and the LA train left from east LA instead of the LA harbor that it it assumed..
AI would safely allow the trains to stop before they collided several hours too late....

 

[MaverickDragon]

Where I'm encountering AI is in customer service. It's becoming very difficult to actually talk to a live person to resolve a problem. Biggest example so far is Frontier Communications. If you have a phone/internet problem, the only way to get it resolved is to say cancel service. That gets you to a live person. You still end up canceling because that person can't get ahold of anyone either to resolve an issue.

I was actually able to talk to a UPS representative to resolve an issue with a delivery.
It took 30 minutes on the phone. Whenever the bot would ask a question, I'd give it an unintelligible response. Repeatedly. The bot eventually gave up and connected me to a live agent.

 

[commadorebob]

Sorry, in my world RFP meant Request For Proposals. Is that your meaning? Are you seeing RFPs requiring human replies?

Yes. Our clients' RFPs are all insisting that their customers be able to talk to human beings rather than AI.

 

[Cherokee]

AI is a fancy chatbot with a token system for retaining data in memory. It frequently hallucinates data it has no reference for. It also requires massive resources to run.

Remember when Hydrogen was the next big thing?

I do !
Hydrogen was a great idea and would have been a major
contributor/supplement to oil and EV tech.
Big oil killed that idea. It’s easy when you control the media.
Power is often abused.

Did you know the only exhaust from the hydrogen engines was H2O !

Um that’s water for the twat waffles.

 

[sprubs]

the AI price hikes are coming. they can't operate at a loss forever. and oh man it's going to be quite the crash for the US economy.

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