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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

#281

Post by EliRivers »

Tade0 wrote: post #41
jayanaka98 wrote: post #23

The reason AI fails in Industry is that SKILL.md or other knowledge-injection methods do not guarantee compliance. AI just thinks it "knows better".

A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times. I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.

A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times.

It's a model of language, yes? Trained on a big corpus of text.

I have read a lot of stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and inevitably they did it. Like, lots. Far more than stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and they then didn't do it.

If I'm reading a story or account of something, and it's really hammered home that they've been told not to do something, it's kind of inevitable that they will then do that. I'm not even an LLM and I noticed that's the way these things usually go.

So is an LLM just doing what it's been trained to do? Sometimes in the stories and accounts, there's a whole lot of time and tension before the bad thing happens, but that's just part of the fun.

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

#282

Post by sharts »

exabrial wrote: post #94

For those of us who lived through the "Offshoring" Craze of the mid-2000s, this has the exact same arc. Corp CEOs / CFOs golf buddies coouldn't stop yapping about how much they saved paying people less by offshoring. So step 1, they fire a bunch of people and send work overseas, driving up their financial metrics for 5-6 quarters until their staff and their organization finally break at stage 2. Turns out cultural an…

Funny thing is, for all the commenters agreeing that this type of leadership is broken, most of the folks here and everywhere end up always doing the same things once they find themselves in similar positions of power / decision making.

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

#283

Post by jm4 »

asveikau wrote: post #201
jm4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Not getting fired is not the same as isolation from consequences. People who make rational decisions and achieve results get opportunities to make more impactful decisions. People who don't get results don't get more opportunities - or maybe find themselves in a situation where the scope of their decisions (and blast radius) is limited. Firing is for misconduct or when someone has no value to offer. It's more of a spectrum than a binary thing.

I can't speak for how these particular executives were handled. I've never worked at a place where people were quickly fired for mistakes unless it was something extreme. It's usually based on track record rather than a single thing. Most employers understand that if they fired people for making mistakes they would run out of employees very fast. On the other hand, someone who learns from a mistake probably isn't going to do it again so you may have a better employee than a hypothetical replacement. It's also generally understood that people with a large scope of responsibilities have a large blast radius when things don't work out. It just comes with the territory and it's not exclusive to the executive suite.

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

#284

Post by gargamel9 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #65
contravariant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If compliance was the main issue we wouldn't have had to invent ways for computers to do something other than exactly what they were asked.

We didn't have to do that. It is, in fact, extremely stupid that we have done that. Computers are valuable because they are fast and deterministic . Fast but stochastic has no value.

What about slow and stochastic? 9 out of 10 managers seems to agree about this, at least it seems to be that, judging through their actions.

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

#285

Post by jm4 »

alpha_squared wrote: post #218
jm4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree that you don't want to punish people for making bad decisions, I do think there should be a carveout for when those decisions impact people's lives.

Lots of decisions impact lives. Some are literally life and death decisions. Sometimes the best decision possible with the information available at the time is going to turn out badly. Or maybe a bad decision achieves a good result.

That's why I'm saying to separate the process from the result when determining consequences. Someone who consistently exercises good judgment and who makes well-reasoned, thoughtful decisions is likely to achieve good results more often than someone who doesn't. But, event then, some things just don't work out and it impacts people's lives.

I would absolutely fire those idiots at Ford though. There's nothing wrong with trying to leverage AI. Personally, I like AI tools and I rely on them daily. But if someone lacks the judgment to figure out when a job should be performed by a human then they shouldn't be able to make decisions about how to use AI. These people are clearly out of their depth and just faking it. Clown show.

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

#286

Post by mschuster91 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #268
mschuster91 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe. The real danger for the economy is when the runway finally runs out. And I believe we are at a perfect-storm scenario... AI is obviously a giant wash-trading bubble that alone would be sufficient to trigger a repeat of the 2007ff c…

And that's how you get a new war. Line must go up isn't only for the corps, its for US GOV debt too. Interest payments are already close to $1 trillion. As soon as GDP growth doesn't stay ahead of the compounding interest, the music stops. The line must go up or you get a sovereign deb crisis. When all other avenues are expended, the gov must force the economy to expand by any means necessary. Historically, that mean…

Government debt can go down too. Democrat governments have been historically pretty good at balancing the budgets - only for their Republican successors to waste all of the effort on tax cuts for the rich and, yes, yet another dipshit war.

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

#287

Post by spwa4 »

sneak wrote: post #144
teiferer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not mandated by law though. Shouldn't companies following such stupidity be easily out-competed by those that don't? In he market for their products/services but also in the market for employment.

This would be true if the government didn’t have ridiculous outdated requirements for starting new companies.

The kinds of companies this is talking about cannot legally be started in France. We're talking about the largest companies:

Credit Agricole, a "cooperative" bank that is ruled by union contracts that impose strict limits on how many commas in the rulebook are allowed to move per decade. A company where any change gets so stuck committees they found it easier to implement changes through parliament than through the company's own management structure. Several times.

Total, government owned oil company that gets special tax treatment and gives free shares to French presidents and ministers who leave office. Actually has a good reputation as an employer, but not because there is any chance in hell of getting promoted.

EDF, the power company (mostly nuclear), who are positively famous in how difficult they are to work with, both internally and externally. But, have a good reputation as an employer.

France Telecom, which used to be a subsidiary of EDF. They split off to remove worker protections from their (many) employees. Still extremely tied to the government. They have an extremely poor reputation as an employer (as in they have driven employees to suicide).

If you try to start any such companies in France, the government is going to outright sabotage you, whatever the laws say.

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

#288

Post by jm4 »

barkerja wrote: post #250
jm4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's easy to take that stance in jest .. when it has no material impact on you. But if your life was uprooted by the decision of an executive because they made what was a "good faith" decision for the benefit of the shareholder, then I'd wager you may feel differently.

My life already was uprooted by those exact decisions... A couple times... The first guy fucked up so badly that every last one of us lost our jobs, including him. He was an unqualified moron who weaseled his way into a position where his bad decisions had major consequences. It was extremely frustrating. It happens. It will happen again. That's life.

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

#289

Post by daishi55 »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #219
daishi55 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Consequences for mistakes” is generally not a good way of operating. Kind of the whole idea behind a blameless retro for example.

Execs are paid an extraordinary amount of money because they are the ultimate decision makers and should be responsible for their decisions.

So they should get paid lots of money to never do anything risky?

Sometimes things don’t work out. That doesn’t mean it was a punishable offense to try.

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

#290

Post by asveikau »

jm4 wrote: post #283
asveikau wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Not getting fired is not the same as isolation from consequences. People who make rational decisions and achieve results get opportunities to make more impactful decisions. People who don't get results don't get more opportunities - or maybe find themselves in a situation where the scope of their decisions (and blast radius) is limited. Firing is for misconduct or when someone has no value to offer. It's more of a sp…

> People who don't get results don't get more opportunities

This shows to me that you have a lot of faith in these companies that I can't share based on my own experiences.

My experience is more like: the defining characteristics of what gets you more opportunities is personal attachment to the boss. They like you? You get more. The whole performance review culture, as an example, is based around phony justifications around this. They get to re-define what "getting results" means to favor buddies. This is the only determining factor, period, and people come across to me as absurdly foolish when they believe something else.

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