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

[DS_Ohio]

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/ai-boom-propping-markets-could-103218567.html

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[Beau]

One of the first rules I learned in the computer industry was GIGO. Garbage In = Garbage Out.

 

[Nuvolari]

 

[sajohnson]

Computer operator back in the day.
Jim Walter Corporation raised my family.
IBM 355, and later the 360,
Then Amdahl 370 systems,
Our mavericks couldn’t even haul the continuous form printer.

Disk drives the size of washing machines,
We had ten,
Tape drives the size of refrigerators, we had eight.

My all time favorite, the modems.
The size of a Yamaha audio video amplifier/tuner.
800 baud.
The handshake often took twenty seconds.

Halon fire suppression systems.
Oh my.

Speaking of halon...

At Metro (DC Metrorail) some train control rooms had halon fire suppression. One day, a tech was warming up some food in the microwave and it began to smoke. The halon alarm went off giving the guys 10-15 seconds to hit the huge red "Abort" button. Ordinarily that would not have been a problem but these particular techs had English as a second language and did not understand what 'abort' meant.

They left as $30,000 worth of halon poured into the TCR. The FD responded, along with lots of upper management types.

It led to a pointless system-wide ban on microwave ovens, coffee makers, etc., in TCRs. In addition to the microwave, we had 2 coffee makers. Management was frantically looking for the owners in order to write them up. Of course we all played dumb. Had they bothered to turn the coffee makers around they would have seen my 'unit #' on one of them.

 

[A112358]

Speaking of halon...

At Metro (DC Metrorail) some train control rooms had halon fire suppression. One day, a tech was warming up some food in the microwave and it began to smoke. The halon alarm went off giving the guys 10-15 seconds to hit the huge red "Abort" button. Ordinarily that would not have been a problem but these particular techs had English as a second language and did not understand what 'abort' meant.

They left as $30,000 worth of halon poured into the TCR. The FD responded, along with lots of upper management types.

It led to a pointless system-wide ban on microwave ovens, coffee makers, etc., in TCRs. In addition to the microwave, we had 2 coffee makers. Management was frantically looking for the owners in order to write them up. Of course we all played dumb. Had they bothered to turn the coffee makers around they would have seen my 'unit #' on one of them.

So they banned microwave ovens instead of banning employees who don't understand English?

 

[sajohnson]

They were good guys. My thinking was that it was Metro's fault for not ensuring that that they could read, write, and speak English reasonably well before putting them out in the field.

 

[James K]

Except it really is not garbage in and AI is putting garbage out. More like correct data coming in and AI makes the best guess that may or may not be what the intended outcome is.

It is hard and next to impossible to codify for AI what real human “experience” is that is left out of a lot of processes and documentation. It is the myriads of little things that are written in margins and held in human memory that make getting an item from the drawing to a producible product that is deliverable. AI cannot do that at this present stage.

Sorry, AI has no means of detecting conjecture or even purposely false information. Heck, I know of several theories still being used that are disproved or heavily suspect. To me that's garbage in.

 

[MavGeek]

Sorry, AI has no means of detecting conjecture or even purposely false information. Heck, I know of several theories still being used that are disproved or heavily suspect. To me that's garbage in.

Agree. There’s a ton of garbage in, that’s the issue. As humans we have a protective BS meter. AI does not. It just goes out there and pukes up whatever it finds.

 

[grumpyunk]

AI may be like ISO-9000 or outsourcing. Some of it will work and work well, some will be like asking a squirrel where to hide a donut.
I asked an AI how to build a stand using a set of materials. The answer ignored the material restriction. Not very impressed.
AI will also lie when asked about some small OPE engine details. It stated a B&S had a compression release when official doc indicated otherwise...
Trust but verify? It may be the most useful hint about using AI.
AI also will be limited in how it answers moral questions, and encouraging someone to end their life, and giving instructions shoudl, IMO, not be in their area of operation.
I expect it to be hyped until prognosticators have sold all their stock in AI firms and will then lapse back into something to consider, but not a panacea that will change the world. It has its uses, but so far has not proven to be the best thing since sliced bread. IMO.

 

[grumpyunk]

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

I think the problem is that AI has been sold as able to do wonders in every situation in evey field of endeavor. I think, conversely, that is may prove useful in limited areas, with limited fields of knowledge. As noted, it can detect patterns that human researchers and examiners may not recognize, but to tell you whether it is right or wrong to cheat a parking meter should be out of its realm of advice. It has no compunction about lying, or making stuff up. That will likely not work to well in the fields of engineering and chemistry, and I hope younger learners are advised to take AI instructions with a LARGE grain of salt. "always add acid" - ask an AI why, and do they have any other better bon-mots to add...

 

[BlueSpec1]

Easy to forget the various equipment I used to work on.
Notes on a Halon dump at our pipeline SCADA computer room during a thunder storm near Houston in 1993.

"Lightning caused the failure of IDNX node 50 at SPLC's facility in Pasadena.
The lightning strike apparently entered through commercial power into a remote bridge, through the V.35 cable into the backplane of the IDNX. Both the remote bridge and IDNX were damaged.
The entire IDNX chassis and several rear interface cards had to be replaced.
The node was repaired within 4 hours of the incident.
One of the T1s normally used with the IDNX was re-routed into Cylink CSU/DSUs at the Information Center and Pasadena to bring up temporary data communication services while the IDNX could be repaired."

"Pasadena IDNX node 50 did take a hit today at about 11:30 ~. Smoked the backplane and caused a computer room halon dump.
Three back side cards melted into backplane and one USD (V.35) card missing most of connector on edge.
Established a T-1 circuit around the Node and pipeline data restored.
Net responded and changed the entire card cage and four cards.
None failed but only ones that melted and could not be pulled out."

IDNX multiplexor (T1 based) network with 10 SYNC 4.8kb circuits.

 

[grumpyunk]

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.

As a kid, when power cells were new, I thought the only exhaust product would be H2O. Well...
It turns out that it is not pure H2O. Somehow it is contaminated and cannot be used at least without processing for drinking water. I mentally calculated that using H as a fuel would provide the needed water for those 100 miles up... nope.
Fuel cells do not produce as pure a byproduct as exhaust as one might think. Tell me what I missed since last looking back to my childhood in the 1960's... Please.
tom

 

[grumpyunk]

They integrated a bunch of AI tools into our engineering disposition applications that deal with manufacturing issues with the majority of them being either rework or repair dispositions. Rework is pretty straight forward and even for a human engineer, it is a lot of cut and paste of canned dispositions. Repair is a bit more nuanced as it usually involves repairing a part that is not 100% to print but within acceptable limits for product acceptance.

Became apparent that the AI tools will flat out just make shit up when it does not understand something. Company is at the phase of they have spent so much they are trying to make it work at all cost but it is slowly becoming a noose around their neck as billing hours are up just having a human review and correct the garbage it is putting out is starting to affect how our customers view us and writing is on the wall the AI stuff will get the heave ho here pretty soon to save face with our customers.

I am chuckling. "Let's outsource our programming requirements to the FE." Oops... GIGO. And they are not on the same clock, so meetings to discuss 'things' are difficult.
Lets do ISO-9000(?) where the production of concrete life preservers could be made ISO compliant. Just because it is DOCUMENTED to the Nth degree does not mean is it either GOOD or FUNCTIONAL or even effective, it is just documented. Programming comments in the source I found to be a lot more useful than being complant with ISO standards. Maybe outsourcing compliance would work? who knows...
AI wil lie. It will make sh*t up. With a straight face and presented as factually as 'the sun is shining somewhere'. Sort of useless unless you stand there threatening to pull the plug.
IMO.

I'm old enough to have used mainframes as big as a two-car garage, and punch cards.

 

[Hootbro]

Sorry, AI has no means of detecting conjecture or even purposely false information. Heck, I know of several theories still being used that are disproved or heavily suspect. To me that's garbage in.

If the examples I have seen were not proprietary, I would share them. It is not "garbage in" just because the AI cannot understand or model it correctly. More like a 10th grader in a AP calculus class trying to wing it sometimes.

 

[Cherokee]

As a kid, when power cells were new, I thought the only exhaust product would be H2O. Well...
It turns out that it is not pure H2O. Somehow it is contaminated and cannot be used at least without processing for drinking water. I mentally calculated that using H as a fuel would provide the needed water for those 100 miles up... nope.
Fuel cells do not produce as pure a byproduct as exhaust as one might think. Tell me what I missed since last looking back to my childhood in the 1960's... Please.
tom

https://share.google/aimode/bvPEKkFFUc1gMoAUN

There is some sound info here. Tip of the Ice berg.

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