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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

#461

Post by lordkrandel »

Retric wrote: post #378
xantronix wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here. They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.

If it works. Where is this 100x software output? I just see more AI tools to check it does not derail, but where is the actual software revolution, where all developers are fired? I'm still closing AI PR slop here

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

#462

Post by HiPhish »

EmanuelB wrote: post #408
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn Get ready for that promotion!

I love how the images are an AI-generated fever dream. Normally I hate those things, but in this case it's a perfect match for the AI clown world.

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

#463

Post by hdgvhicv »

delusional wrote: post #412
wiether wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by your answer because I can't tell which way you're going. Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere? Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests? I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones.

He's just making a general "efficient markets" argument. He's arguing that whatever happens in a couple of years will be the right thing, no matter what is happening now. That is essentially not an argument in any direction.

It’s also one which ignores the “market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

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

#465

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #392
xantronix wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available.

Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available.

Fantasy: automated productivity

Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy

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

#466

Post by ozgung »

Grimblewald wrote: post #425
murphomatic wrote: post #341

Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed…

Velocity implies direction, AI is just speed sans direction, AI only workflows are just really fast brownian motion centred on training corpus mean for a task. Humans can give it direction, how good that direction is depends on human expertise. We still need the humans, there are no cases for novel useful work I can think of, or have seen, where humans are no longer required.

Good analogy but Brownian motion is not the only type of motion in the nature. Constraints give the direction in a physical system, not humans. Evolution is the best example.

I think objections to the Theory of Evolution and some objections to the feasibility of Artificial Intelligence have many similarities. Most people (because of their world view) assume an “intelligent” Designer is mandatory for organisms to evolve and for nature to work. They assume the nature is “random” and directionless by itself. Only a higher (supernatural) intelligence (God) can give it a “direction”. So “intelligence” is basically an external, supernatural and unexplainable (since its above our nature we don’t have access to it) phenomenon.

The exact same argument applies to AI. But instead of atoms and DNA we have bits and activations. AI is random and directionless. Only a superior intelligence (a human) can give it a direction. Like nature, a computer can’t have intelligence by itself. Intelligence is external, supernatural/supercomputational and unexplainable. You can’t compute it, you can’t understand it, you can’t replicate it.

This is because human intelligence, like God’s intelligence, lives in a supernatural realm. Some people even believe that it’s the same thing as (or a copy of) the divine intelligence. Some others don’t believe that but still have trouble accepting their human intelligence is not a unique phenomenon and not something above this mundane world.

There, I said it. I think without this warning most of the debate and “philosophical” arguments against AI are useless. They are more like wishful thinking, shaped with the world view of the person. It’s about belief and not technical feasibility.

From the technical perspective, most of these rehired Ford folks will be replaced again in a few years. This was about overestimating the short-term effects of the automation. But in the longer term Ford will indeed have much less humans.

BTW, this new trend of “extracting the knowledge of skilled senior workers to replace them” deserves its own name. This is not a good thing for humanity, but this is exactly what they are doing.

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

#467

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #390
Retric wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here. They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.

or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human

If that ever happens the limiting factor will be management.

Perhaps that's where it gets interesting.

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

#468

Post by cultofmetatron »

xantronix wrote: post #358
murphomatic wrote: post #341

Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed…

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

as a CTO, its been crazy pushing back against these AI mandates. Almost always from VCs and non technical contributors. I'm pretty liberal about using AI but it has its limits. I think of them like swim fins. you can dive much deeper with them but if you didn't earn that ability, you can find yourself too deep to get your next breath of air. likewise, its important to never let the ai do work more than one ring outside of your knowledge base lest it do things you dont' understand and therefore can't audit.

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

#469

Post by horizion2025 »

Predictably, now office workers and engineers (including here) will say "What I always knew - LLM's can't think, be creative, don't have nuance. My job is safe!". I predict the article will be quoted again and again at lunch tables and family gatherings. However, one should be especially careful when something confirms ones own biases.

Firstly, the "AI" discussed here is not LLM's. They are talking about visual quality inspection systems. There's been many other articles in the press: Ford's new quality automation is computer-vision defect inspection, built on IBM's visual-inspection tech, iPhones photographing parts on the line, running since 2020. By most reporting it works fine, pushing detection rates from ~70% manual to 99%+. This is classical CNN at work doing the job of quality inspectors... completely unrelated to desk-work by an engineer or what LLM's do... yet that's exactly the inference the headline invites (and many here in the comments seem to be making).

The timing only underlines it: rehiring is presented as the cleanup. Apparently the rehirings started 3 years ago, so whatever it's undoing is older still and therefore unlikely to be LLM driven. While ChatGPT did come out 3.5 years ago it seems doubtful someone would fire people left and right the moment they saw the first ChatGPT... only to then regret almost it immedaitely and rehire them - all within the span of 6 months.

This further supports that the article is about years-old automation bet being quietly unwound, and is completely unrelated to mainstream discussion about AI and jobs today.

Also, 350 rehires is just noise. Ford is shedding thousands right now: plant pauses, battery-plant retooling, projected restructuring in the 8–13k range.

Finally, as always with corporate announcements... ask why an internal staffing decision is even a press story. To me this feels like PR (a nice feel good story that ties into to a subject people discuss a lot now). It takes the sting out of all their announced layoffs. There's probably also internal company politics to it (someone suggested rehirings and now want to say 'see what a great idea this was' and maxx it out).

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

#470

Post by hibikir »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #468
xantronix wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

as a CTO, its been crazy pushing back against these AI mandates. Almost always from VCs and non technical contributors. I'm pretty liberal about using AI but it has its limits. I think of them like swim fins. you can dive much deeper with them but if you didn't earn that ability, you can find yourself too deep to get your next breath of air. likewise, its important to never let the ai do work more than one ring outsi…

It's not unreasonable to mandate that one should try it for some of its safer uses, or to spend time teaching people what the good uses are, which keep growing... but mandating a significant part of the day-to-day is telling employees they have no agency in how they achieve objectives. For people that aren't technical, it shows they aren't good at the social either.
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