“A prospective employee today saying that they don’t use A.I. is the equivalent of a prospective secretary in 1995 saying that she doesn’t use a PC.” — Scott Galloway
I hadn’t thought of it that way before — being preternaturally suspicious of A.I. as I am — but the more I read and speak to people, the more I’m starting to see why the above is true.
I’m just glad I’m not part of today’s prospective employee group.
Yeah, I want a plumber that has to use AI to figure out how to unclog my toilet. Fuck AI.
My last few years as an engineer the big chemical company kept insisting that we can use AI, but only the company approved AI app which they tried to get everyone to install. I looked at how many more years I had to work before I could retire, laughed, and said “fuck it, no” to all AI bullshit.
I asked for very specific examples for where AI could actually help my job (a highly technical position). The only thing they could come up with was “well, if you have a long technical document, you can upload it to the AI app and it will give you a summary of the document”. WTF? How about me, being a highly technically trained engineer, just read the fucking document myself?
All of that is so fucking stupid it boggles the mind.
Don:
I spent 27 years as a project and design engineer for a Fortune 500 company. One of my product responsibilities was an air-to-air heat exchanger. The hand calculations that I originally started with were extensive, looking at finding the interior and exterior of exchanger Reynolds number, Nusselt numbers, etc, with extensive table look-ups. I got them down to the point where I could complete the design calculations in about 8 hours.
When we each got a PC at our desk (it took a LONG time) one of the first things I did was to create a spreadsheet for this calculation. I created graphs from the materials data and did regressions for each curve so that I could generate an equation for the materials properties based on temperature. It took me about a week to get the thing up and running and then tested, all on my own time. I documented the data sources carefully, and put very clear explanations of the calculation sources (Karlekar and Desmond’s “Heat Transfer”, for example) citing edition, page, and equation number.
This enabled me to cut my work time down from 8 hours to about 15 minutes of customer input data to get my required information. I figured I spent about 30 hours or so putting the thing together, so I recouped my initial time investment with the first three calcs I ran through it. Everything after that was gravy. I’ve been retired for 8 years, and that division of the company is still using that spreadsheet.
If somebody can show me evidence of any “AI” or “LLM” that can provide that kind of work I might start to believe that they are an adder to productivity. But everything I have seen and read about attempts to use “AI” for engineering purposes have been grandiose, abject failures.
Between the hallucinations (which is a euphemism for flat-out lying) and programmed desire to please the user the outputs of “AI” should never, ever be trusted for engineering. Any engineer who does use it and doesn’t literally check every step of every calculation, and every data source for verification, should not be allowed to practice. The problem, of course, is that doing that takes just as much time as actually doing the work to begin with. Just how much of a productivity increase is that?
completely agree!
We started using AI. I have found the results from it mixed. But don’t mention that out loud because the AI fucking evangelists in the company treat you like you just said the Watchtower was full of shit.
I can see AI is going to have its uses (unlike the fucking cloud which is just a terrible idea of pushing us all into the “renting” class). But the alleged magic of it is over-exaggerated.
What galls the hell out of me, is I’ll see a Youtube vid that looks fascinating like comparing battleships or Mauser rifles, or nuclear disasters, or whatever the hell catches my eye. Then hearing the fucking AI voice say “Pre TorRy Us” instead of Pretorius. Fecking twats.
Being a boomer I’ve lived and worked through successive waves of technological innovations. No previous change has arrived and been so quick to spread its tentacles than A.I.
You can say what you like about it, but it’s here, going / gone mainstream in places you would never think of. Daughter used A.I. to redo interior finishes of her house as an example.
I’m very glad I have got out of consulting, A.I. is destroying the sector.
I feel very concerned for grandkids making uni choices and entering the workforce.
My point is it’s here. It’s not going away. Educate yourself as a priority.
past creations have replaced labor. The printing press, type writer, etc. AI replaces the thought process of a human. the thought process, diction and writing technique are design features of the human, they are not flaws that need to be fixed AI.