Aou, please move this to another sub if it is more appropriate elsewhere.
i'm an engineer. i work in an office full of other engineers. i used to think engineers were smart, capable of reasoning intelligently when presented with relevant information and aware of basic history on relevant subjects.
i do not think that anymore. like many people, covid disabused me of a few of my more comfortable illusions.
engineers, like most people, will happily defer to "experts" on any given subject. they do this despite being trained to "solve problems" and "think critically" and come up with "creative solutions." it is often easier to defer to some expert than to learn the subject matter for themselves. deferring to the "experts" also absolves them, in their mind, of responsibility for being wrong. "it wasn't my fault, i just did what the expert told me."
so, of course, most people in my field were mask wearing scaredy-goobers who took the clot-shot. the "experts" told them to. strangely, about half the clot-shot takers still believe the "experts" on all things covid. morons.
i should add that the firm i am with now (have been with for about 3 years) has a terrible problem with being a bunch of disorganized bumbling goobers who do not know their jobs, how to train younger people, how to mentor, or otherwise how to build a sustainable, functioning company. my immediate boss is part of a sub-group that has it all mostly figured out but the other group (much larger and with more internal clout) is ran be people who could not find their ass with both hands and a map, even if you told them to follow the smell.
the other group (we'll call them team short bus) runs the show. they're about five times the size of my group. they got as big as they are due to a lot of lucrative government contracts and programs that have since dried up. they have never had to operate intelligently to make money. however, because they made a lot of money and are a lot bigger, they run the show.
short bus is comprised of short term thinkers. i took one of your younger staff (a year in) to help me on some work we have (my group is booming). she doesn't know anything about anything. a year in and she knows about as much as a new-grad hire. i end up mentoring their 5 year and 7 year people as well because they, likewise, do not know nearly what they should for their time in the industry. i'm an old gray hair.
team short bus has finally realized they have major issues on every front. so, what do they want to do? use ai to write technical manuals, produce training videos, etc. what is ai? it's the omni-expert. what is it to these people? it's the shiny object that can solve all their problems, the universal panacea for all things engineering related. what is wrong with this approach?
what was wrong with trusting the "experts" during covid? i asked that of one of these people and she did not get it. "you will never convince me the shots were bad."
what happens when we use it? i did a few short tests of chat-gpt, asked it some basic things procedures for starting certain power tools and servicing common weapons. there were errors in every procedure it wrote. what do you do when your omni-expert is wrong and you're too uneducated to spot the error? you take a shot of magical science-juice, that's what you do.
what else is wrong with ai? if you use ai instead of developing your people and yourselves by diligent study and hard work neither you nor your people ever become experts in a given subject. you remain completely dependent upon the ai tool. if the tool is wrong about something, what happens? ai isn't signing and stamping drawings. you, the so-called "expert" are held accountable. that's why engineers get paid well, after all.
the greatest danger i see with simple ais like chat-gpt and other less potentially powerful tools is the tendency of mankind to use them as the easy way to get something done and to avoid learning how to do things right. these tools will enable us to lose valuable intellectual and reasoning skills and engineering skills in exactly the same way grocery stores enabled us to lose gardening skills. if we become dependent on ai we lose thinking skills.
we also lose familiarity with our work product.
the next 3-5 years are going to be interesting. we will see a lot of people try to use ai to do their jobs only for the ai to make terrible mistakes that burn them while it also proves they don't know how to do it themselves.
i'm encouraging my employer to take an extremely cautious and tentative approach to ai, mostly leaving it for others to play with while we get our shit squared away the traditional way and focus on building our talent internally without ai. i'll probably be ignored and team short bus will probably make fools of themselves.
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