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Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

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Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#201
post #193
post #57

Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playin…

Generally, you don’t want to punish people for making decisions. At least I don’t. I value people who are willing to try things and I generally believe any decision made in good faith is better than no decision. My litmus test is was it a reasonable decision given the information available at the time in service of a greater goal. I can live with the consequences of that. If it turns out to be a not so great decision…

Even from the selfish perspectives of these executives, it can be quite bad to isolate people from the consequences of bad decisions. It will prevent learning from mistakes, and lead to more bad decisions.

Which I guess is getting at another thing. The failure was predictable. People shouldn't be rewarded for failing to avoid obvious predictable failures. Maintaining their status quo could also be seen as rewarding them.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#202
post #57

Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playin…

I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences". Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the…

oh poor babies they got sad their human sacrifices didn't work, that's surely as much punishment as losing your livelihood because a pack of morons act randomly based on feels.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#203
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.

Don't talk like a perpetual labor machine wouldn't be awesome if you had it. You just want to make sure you have it, and not your boss using it against you.

There was a reason why the phrase "perpetual" was used, to invoked how unrealistic perpetual energy machines are and how futile it is for the human race to chase such dreams.

How many tens of trillions of capital have been incinerated in reducing the quality of life for workers compared to actually uplifting them?

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#204
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the rig…

> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?” And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else? I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is d…

> You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else.

You usually don't become a CEO of a long established company by being a pioneer either though...

You may be able to argue this particular case though, as he is a marketing guy and he was a pioneer in marketing as few others capitalized on social media/YouTube when he did.

But I feel like that's completely unrelated to how adjacent that's to what I'd consider a pioneer in a CEO position. Hence me pushing back a lil

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#205
I have a simple mind. I think of a company with 100 employees building a dozen houses at a time. That company could replace a six-person framing crew with a two-person, one-robot team as an experiment. They could do various experiments to see if there was a better option here. It would be at the expense of four employees.

A company with 1000 employees that builds 100 houses at a time might cut a dozen employees to create three robot crews. A 10,000-employee company that builds 1000 houses at a time would still only need to experiment with a handful of crews, affecting only 20-30 or so employees.

I marvel that a company has let themselves grow so out of touch with their business that they can't understand the impact of changes without carnage at this scale.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all know what you mean. But doing what is necessary to make the overall automated system more autonomous = training, at this 30,000 foot altitude.

Well for grandma on the street I can accept that, but shouldn't at least the tech community be more precise in terminology? "AI" is also a misnomer. So many things in our industry are that it always takes some layers of digging in a new area to understand what they actually mean because the words have shifted their meaning.

Ray tracing says hello.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#207
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the rig…

There's the added cost that the best people are the least likely to return after a layoff.

And those which return will have zero loyalty to firm.

Once you were dumped for AI gamble, you will never do the extra work, because you will probably be dumped in year or so, when someone else will get same or different stupid idea.

But it's not stupid idea, it's more like desperate attempt to remain in game in competitive market by doing what everyone else does. Idea crafted to final decision by people paid to see a bigger picture ... which unfortunatelly stop seeing smaller things which matters.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any consequence for execs who don't layoff when they are supposed to? You have to look at the situation symmetrically.

Why does it need to be symmetric? There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people. We already do with legislation that requires severance packages and tax benefits for hiring. Many countries go much further.

If its not symmetric then you bias towards status quo which is a really bad way to act as a CEO.

> There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people.

Yeah that's not how a company should run.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#209
post #20

> Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product. Clearly a lot of careful thought went into their strategy of using AI and firing engineers.

This idea is everywhere right now, that AI is some magic black box that will solve all your business problems. The sentiment is spreading through the exec team where I work now too. It's like a disease. C-suites completely disconnected from reality and assuming we've already achieved ASI/AGI, and marketing teams & business journals are only furthering that narrative. It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI th…

If you are incapable of doing more than "spring init my_app" then the current models are like magic.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#210
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know. Because we've been alive in America long enough to see this cycle thousands of times. The execs rarely face the music for bad decisions. A round of layoffs looks like a failure to us, but to the investors it was a good idea that didn't work out so there's no punishment…

If you allow a likely guess with no evidence to play the role of fact, you're just as bad as the AIs

America has a convicted felon as president?
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