Ford Looking to Rehire Humans

[RPP]

Saw this news story today and it made me happy. Let that AI bubble explode like a nasty boil.

[Glovebox Operator]

I'm shocked AI couldn't figure it out. Making 7 wheeled trucks and stuff.

[Jonnydread]

I have been a lifelong Japanese car guy, but if Ford starts making more decisions like these I may consider jumping ship

[RPP]

I too hail from the Japanese car gang, and this is a good move imo. Unfortunately, Ford CEO has been public recently about his lack of respect for right to repair... so keep that in mind.

[SignOfZeta]

This is happening all over. It’s hard to find too many stories about people being successfully replaced by AI. It’s hard to even think of jobs it could actually do. They say it’s good at coding and that’s possible I guess but I don’t really understand coding enough to see proof of that so that might not really be true either. I work in the automobile industry, I do a lot of stuff for Ford and I can’t really think of any decent uses for AI in any of the projects I’m working on. Maybe somewhere deep in the ECU code? Maybe somewhere in CFD analysis? Maybe. Maybe those are just jobs I’m not capable of and it’s easy to be fooled by AI’s abilities in areas where I’m most ignorant. Maybe that effect is the reason this shit is so huge right now. There are a lot of people who invest in other people’s work and don’t know how to actually do anything else.

AI is the kind of thing that seems like it can do “anything” but if you restrict its output to useful tasks only you’ll find that it’s closer to “nothing”. The similarities to the 3D printer fad are pretty incredible…

[SignOfZeta]

I too hail from the Japanese car gang, and this is a good move imo. Unfortunately, Ford CEO has been public recently about his lack of respect for right to repair... so keep that in mind.

Have you ever actually worked on an F series truck from the last 30 years? They’re already more of a PITA than anything on the road. They need…stuff…constantly and are some of the most difficult to repair machines in existence. There are countless aftermarket special tools to help with this but it’s still extremely common to REMOVE A BODY to SERVICE THE ENGINE, which is absolutely ridiculous, but customers don’t care. Customers will buy F-250 diesel trucks for $100,000 and dump $100 a week in fuel into them until they run out of all the money their dad left them. Their target customers are addicted, dynastically.

[RPP]

No I have not, and your comment makes me glad I have not lol. Thats a good point. Seems like they are there already...

[FullContactUSA]

Seems a bit extreme there bud. My first truck was a Ford, actually all my trucks have been Fords, and when my family got too big for an F Series I bought the extra long Expedition. I drove 2 of them to 200k miles, and the Expedition I have now is at 141k and runs like a top. That said, my wife drives a Toyota.

[SignOfZeta]

The fact that you own and love Fords doesn’t make them less hard to work on. Having the money to always pay other people to do the work makes things easier for YOU but having money doesn’t make the truck easier to work on for the people who actually WORK on the trucks. All you said here was “I like Ford so much I can’t handle anyone saying anything bad about them whatsoever.” and that blind loyalty was already mentioned in my post, FullContactUSA. I already know about you.

[tyronejk]

I work in software/coding and in my experience, genAI/LLM's are about as useful as first-year interns. Yeah, you can get them to write code, but only the easy busy-work type stuff and that's after you spend as much time explaining what you want as it would take to write the damn thing yourself.

I'm kind of a curmudgeon but even my younger coworkers are reaching the same conclusion. My youngest coworkers (interns and first-years) are misled by genAI more often than getting useful results from it.

I think one of the few actual benefits (which is obvious if you know how LLM's work) is basically being able to google stuff better. E.g. instead of looking for exact keyword matches, you can get results from "soft" matches like synonyms and context.

[RAZRBAKK]

A friend of mine thinks hes going to revolutionize dealership CRM software he's been """coding""" with AI.

Most of the people who have benefited from AI are fake-jobbers that want to spend more time on the green and less time yapping in emails.

[trashcollector]

Don’t accept any offer to return unless the pay and benefits are doubled.

[RPP]

tyronejk SignOfZeta I've been at a loss for words for a while thinking about how these companies think their investments in AI are going to pay off. Its just nice to see its coming all the way back around.