Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
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@evacide Sad that some execs will lose their jobs over this colossal error. Surely?
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@evacide Good story overall, but disheartening to read these parts:
…while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems.
and
The company said it would not abandon its use of AI, but plans to now use it in conjunction with human oversight and experience.
IOW—we're rehiring you to train yourself out of a job…
My rate for training myself out of a job is my usual rate plus the value of the job I'm training myself out of. So the negotiation starts at 2x my pay, and then we talk about working conditions.
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@evacide Sad that some execs will lose their jobs over this colossal error. Surely?
Yeah, we don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Careless people ain’t never gotta take consequences
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My rate for training myself out of a job is my usual rate plus the value of the job I'm training myself out of. So the negotiation starts at 2x my pay, and then we talk about working conditions.
@petealexharris @evacide You're selling yourself short… My starting rate is 5x the value of the job I'm training my replacement for…
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@evacide Sadly they are rehiring only the senior engineers because they are betting after just a couple more years and just a bit more training, they won't need any engineers. They don't need to invest in the next generation of "grey beards".
The generational deficit of AI along with every other imaginable, economic, and financial and social deficit it’s inflicting on us is going to be incredibly bad. I don’t actually know if I have the words to express what I think I’m feeling about this.
What it feels like is that good sensible people the senior engineers need to go off into a corner and bring along a bunch of kids and train to be the core of the people who survive the fallout
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@evacide Wankers. That's Ford though - Found On Rubbish Dumps. They've always been shit.
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@petealexharris @evacide You're selling yourself short… My starting rate is 5x the value of the job I'm training my replacement for…
@unattributed @evacide
Yeah, but bear in mind I'm also not going to bother doing it very well. -
Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide Found On Road Dead...
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Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide wonder if this is why my mach-e was so bad.
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Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide Labor has always been and will always be the component of business that business hates most and works hardest to literally eliminate.
The cost of human labor is the biggest drain on business profits, and what business spends most of its efforts on eliminating, in every way it can imagine, and make legal, or at least weakly enforced.
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Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide aka the goose is unvalued
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@evacide Labor has always been and will always be the component of business that business hates most and works hardest to literally eliminate.
The cost of human labor is the biggest drain on business profits, and what business spends most of its efforts on eliminating, in every way it can imagine, and make legal, or at least weakly enforced.
@ricardoharvin @evacide
I take issue with one part of this.
I used to think the cost of labor explains corporation behavior. A thing I've learned from the past few years is that it's not true. More than the cost of labor, corporate execute leadership loathes workers having a voice and power to make their own choices. They want total control wherever they can achieve it. They will spend money that far exceeds labor costs for a chance at that. -
@evacide “The company said it would not abandon its use of AI, but plans to now use it in conjunction with human oversight and experience.”
@feisty_lemming @evacide @matthewskelton They are >< this close to getting it.
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@evacide Quite simply they can't own engineers so they want to pretend they're commodities that can be swapped out at will, and they've stamped out anyone telling them otherwise for so long that they've convinced themselves it's true. This state of denial has set them up to be incapable of recognizing how much the success of their companies hinges on people being obsessively beholden to quality, not their bottom line. 2/2
@kevingranade I believe this is called deprofessionalization, but yeah its to make specific roles and workers weaker so they're easier to replace.
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@ricardoharvin @evacide
I take issue with one part of this.
I used to think the cost of labor explains corporation behavior. A thing I've learned from the past few years is that it's not true. More than the cost of labor, corporate execute leadership loathes workers having a voice and power to make their own choices. They want total control wherever they can achieve it. They will spend money that far exceeds labor costs for a chance at that.In my opinion, that all comes down to, in the long term, reducing the power of the workers which ultimately leads to increasing control of labor costs in every way possible.
Short term losses have nearly always resulted in long term gains when it comes to the sustained assaults on worker power, i.e. rights
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In my opinion, that all comes down to, in the long term, reducing the power of the workers which ultimately leads to increasing control of labor costs in every way possible.
Short term losses have nearly always resulted in long term gains when it comes to the sustained assaults on worker power, i.e. rights
@ricardoharvin
We might just disagree and the distinction probably doesn't matter.
It's been useful to be aware of in public sector labor negotiation. A lot of it is about costs, for sure. But some of it is that exectives emotionally need to feel powerful. Example: Return to office pushes. It is much more expensive maintaining workplaces. But the executives get itchy when they go too long not seeing staff at desks when they walk around the building. -
@bkuhn It's right there in the second paragraph:
The US automaker hired over 350 veteran engineers, referred to internally as “gray beards”, over the past three years in order to address mistakes made by automated systems.
@evacide Oops, sorry, I missed it! (I must have missed it when I read and then maybe searched for grey rather than gray, but I thought I searched for beard).
Anyway, thanks for putting in quotes, although maybe better not to promulgate their bad word choice?
Thank you again for sharing the article!
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Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide
> 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.Knowing that a CEO's job is to be that stupid, still did not prepare me from psychic damage from this sentence…
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@evacide
> 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.Knowing that a CEO's job is to be that stupid, still did not prepare me from psychic damage from this sentence…
Trying inventing multiple, modular, utterly complementary solutions that make "bad" requirements effectively impossible:
- only to discover that no one wants it
- until and unless they can steal it from you
- for their own commodification and profitWhich is why I eat my popcorn and chuckle, softly. Me and my bad attitude love getting every, single receipt these days.
Bring it daily lately.
🪔
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Ford rehires "greybeard" engineers after its push for AI automation backfires.
"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."
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ford-ai-automation-human-workers-b3003787.html
@evacide
and the fascinating thing about this is that the execs who laid off the people got bonuses and awards for it. And the same execs who then solved that problem by hiring back some of the people got bonuses and awards for it. And the people who tried to keep things afloat while the experienced workers were not available to help most likely got poor performance reviews because "they didn't prompt the AI correctly".This is oversimplifying things, but structurally it's what I see happening in quite a few places. Layoffs justified by AI, sky-rocketing workloads for the remaining workforce combined with lower performance ratings / lower rewards, and generous rewards for the execs perpetrating the nonsense.
