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GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

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Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#51

Post by beardbandit »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #48
anonym29 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI can't be held accountable I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.

If a human messes up enough eventually they well get fired, fined or jailed. An AI will not. A human also knows they might get punished if it messes up bad enough, which might cause it to think twice before doing something bad. For an AI there is a reward, but there is no risk. So while both might lie, only the human will be worried that it will be found out. That makes a difference.

There is a human in the loop that either prompted the agent or approved the code. So it doesn't matter if the AI is accountable or not.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#52

Post by anonym29 »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #48
anonym29 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI can't be held accountable I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.

If a human messes up enough eventually they well get fired, fined or jailed. An AI will not. A human also knows they might get punished if it messes up bad enough, which might cause it to think twice before doing something bad. For an AI there is a reward, but there is no risk. So while both might lie, only the human will be worried that it will be found out. That makes a difference.

You say that like all humans are alike: that they all care about getting fired, fined, or jailed; that they're even considering punishment when they're making their decisions; that risk factors into decision making.

What you are describing is a hypothetical "rational person". In real life, even the most rational people you know do completely irrational things routinely.

The Therac-25 engineers were accountable. The 737 MAX engineers were accountable. Accountability is doing much less work in the safety story than you seem to think.

The real work is done by process, redundancy, independent review, formal methods. None of these inherently require someone to be penalized for making mistakes, and penalizing people for making mistakes is a demonstrably, empirically unreliable mechanism for preventing mistakes.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#53

Post by the_af »

beardbandit wrote: post #51
legostormtroopr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human messes up enough eventually they well get fired, fined or jailed. An AI will not. A human also knows they might get punished if it messes up bad enough, which might cause it to think twice before doing something bad. For an AI there is a reward, but there is no risk. So while both might lie, only the human will be worried that it will be found out. That makes a difference.

There is a human in the loop that either prompted the agent or approved the code. So it doesn't matter if the AI is accountable or not.

I hear you, but isn't the human in the loop precisely the one who should be putting their foot down and saying "no, the AI shouldn't be writing the tests to begin with", which would bring us full circle?

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#54

Post by 2ndorderthought »

Insanity wrote: post #27
thot_experiment wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems insane to let the AI write the tests. AI can't be held accountable, it shouldn't be writing the tests that determine whether car systems function correctly.

If you wouldn’t let AI run your nuclear power plant, you need to drink more of the AI kool-aid.

All these luddites out here. The cats out of the bag. Get with the program. Give the AI nukes already.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#55

Post by 2ndorderthought »

darth_avocado wrote: post #28
2ndorderthought wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laid off ai workers are cheaper. I saw a job posting for a vibe coder, 20 bucks an hour.

I don’t believe anyone trying to hire 20 bucks an hour for vibe coders is a serious employer. You’d make more money being a barista in some cities or a substitute teacher.

It's out there. Maybe it's not serious but it is kind of a weird thing to post on multiple job boards.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#56

Post by anonym29 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #33
anonym29 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI can't be held accountable I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.

"Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes" This statement suggests you don't believe in some combination of neuroplasticity as a concept or the arrow of time.

Tell the families of the people who died on 737 MAX disasters. "Don't worry - everything's going to be okay! The engineers learned from their mistakes - accountability works, you have nothing to be sad about!"

Tell the family of the person killed by a semi truck driver who showed up to work drunk or high: "Don't worry - the driver went to jail! Accountability prevented anything bad from happening!"

Accountability alone fails to prevent deadly mistakes millions of times a day; millions of mistakes are avoided daily through process, redundancy, independent review, and formal methods.

"Accountability prevents mistakes" is a comforting delusion. In reality, accountability is only marginally related to whether or not mistakes are made.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#57

Post by AlotOfReading »

porphyra wrote: post #21

AI is a godsend for automotive coding. It's really annoying how at some ASIL levels you need 100% code coverage of unit tests. With AI, all you have to do is to get your agent to generate the tests! Likewise with all the MISRA C requirements. Need your cyclomatic complexity to be less than 10? It's just one prompt away! Now your spaghetti code can easily satisfy the safety requirements with much less effort.

As someone who's worked on this kind of stuff at GM, I don't really get the exuberance in this particular space (not just the comment I'm responding to).

If you want 100% coverage, you just autogenerate the test cases. LLMs can't properly check MISRA requirements, so they're really just a layer on top existing automated checkers. Same for complexity metrics, it doesn't get merged if it violates that (or it's a vendor dependency you won't touch anyway).

If you care about the spirit of the rules, they're not that big a difference. If you don't care, there are already ways to do this. In either case they're an incremental change, not what I'd call a godsend.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#58

Post by binarymax »

WarmWash wrote: post #29

Probably should just replace their software engineers too. I don't mean to throw shade, but automotive software is so bad I'd bet my life that Claude could do better. Nevermind that the update cycle seems to be 6-10 months for changes like "You can now reset your radio presets directly from the radio settings menu", while bugs like temperature control resetting to max cool every start-up never get fixed.

Well, if all the training data for auto software was trash anyway, then you know what they say:

Carbage in, carbage out.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#59

Post by 2ndorderthought »

scorpioxy wrote: post #36
2ndorderthought wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea it's vibe/agentic coding. That's what about half of the current jobs are right now. It's really sad. Saw a vibe coder job today, 20bucks an hour

Interesting. I saw contractor rates dropping here too. The ones I saw recently were at pre-pandemic levels so from 6 years ago. The large increase in cost of living from that time makes it even worse. The funny part is that the skills and experience that are being asked for are at a senior level. So I guess that would be senior level vibe coder at junior rates?

Management literally doesn't realize that you can't exactly vibe code a serious project? Maybe they just don't care and it's an experiment. Super low risk I guess, depending on the city they might pay the floor cleaner more than that.

Re: GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

#60

Post by 2ndorderthought »

elwebmaster wrote: post #35
AngryData wrote: post #24

Best excuse they got to fire well paid and experienced proffessionals that have worked for them for decades and replace them with low paid new hires. But GM isn't in a great spot to be weathering any negative downstream effects. And after seeing how they treat employees for decades ill have zero sympathy for them when things go downhill.

You won't be asked, your tax dollars will just be used to bail them out, either directly or through tariffs. Because democracy.

You see we socialize the losses and capitalize the profits. Works great for everyone
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