Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly

sspeckx about 2 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on the-independent.com

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murphomatic•about 1 hour ago

Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality.

xantronix•25 minutes ago

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

groundzeros2015•19 minutes ago

Why would you assume that?

xantronix•12 minutes ago

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

rebuilder•11 minutes ago

To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.

mpyne•3 minutes ago

No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.

hsbauauvhabzb•43 minutes ago

Nah, that’s the future executives problem, the current executive gets to brag about how their AI integrations cut costs while maintaining an acceptable yet enshittified quality

WarmWash•2 minutes ago

From when this story was posted a few days ago:

Ford has hired 350 engineers over the last 3 years which happened alongside short comings in using AI inspection tooling. This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware to do visual inspections.

rmason•about 1 hour ago

Back in the nineties Ford ran a lot of ads about how quality was job one. But in the last twenty years their quality declined by a large amount at the same time other brands were getting better. I say that as a lifelong fan of Ford, quality was why I left the brand two years ago.

xprnio•39 minutes ago

(As a non American) I remember hearing a joke that goes something like “How do you fix a Chevrolette? Buy a Ford”, but nowadays I guess a bike is a better option

DaSHacka•37 minutes ago

Or more realistically a Toyota, and their numbers are reflecting this.

petersellers•25 minutes ago

Which numbers are those? Their sales numbers or their numbers of vehicle recalls due to defective engine manufacturing?

kortilla•23 minutes ago

They destroyed their heavier truck reputation with this new Tundra unfortunately

samudrijan•13 minutes ago

Fix Or Repair Daily

AceJohnny2•44 minutes ago

It's impressive all the recall notices I get on my 2020 Escape Hybrid. At this point I joke with my friends that they're love-letters from Ford.

(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)

pmontra•25 minutes ago

And yet all the time you spend performing those recalls should be annoying. Maybe you don't plan to eventually sell your car on the second hand market but if you do, a car without all the required recalls could have a lower value than one with all the recalls applied.

AceJohnny2•10 minutes ago

eh, every 6 months to a year I bring the car in to the dealer to handle the stack of pending recalls, during which I get a rental, courtesy of Ford. It's not much of a deal for me.

Few of the issues I've experienced with the car were clearly tied to quality issues: 1) Battery died a few times, but maybe that was user error 2) squirrels/rats nibbled the engine cable harness, a not-uncommon occurrence in our area. Only 3) auto-unlock on passenger side being unreliable is clearly a quality/design issue.

Honestly, I actually love the Escape. The pedal feel is very responsive in all driving modes, compared in particular to the 2020 Hybrid Rav4, which felt like driving a boat (maybe I didn't find the drive mode?), or the 2020 VW Tiguan which had a shockingly slow automatic transmission for an ostensibly "sporty" vehicle. And I'm not even a car guy. I also love its actual buttons on the dashboard, instead of the idiotic "everything on a huge touchscreen" that too many cars do nowadays.

morkalork•9 minutes ago

The same Ford whose bean counters caused them decades of reputational damage over skimping on rust protection? Seems like they haven't learned any lessons at all.

lowbloodsugar•40 minutes ago

If a company is saying “X is job one” it’s because they suck at X. They sucked at quality. They still suck at quality.

rmason•2 minutes ago

Actually in the latest J.D. Power initial quality ratings they took a big step up in quality. I think it was the first time in 15-20 years that they were on the list of recommended major brands.

https://archive.is/VcL8c

kortilla•24 minutes ago

Ebbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.

koolba•18 minutes ago

The other classic one is, “What’s Ford backwards? Driver Returns On Foot.”

bartread•about 1 hour ago

Well, at least they learned from the experience, and that’s good.

The more interesting question, I think, is what proportion of businesses will choose the learn from Ford’s experience without first choosing to relive it?

Often people, and therefore also organisations, struggle to usefully learn from the experience of others without repeating the same mistakes, and experiencing the same pain.

noisy_boy•41 minutes ago

> while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems

Our AI sucked but that doesn't mean less AI. We need better AI, not humans.

dotcoma•44 minutes ago

Amongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.

bombela•43 minutes ago

Not yet perhaps.

moomoo11•33 minutes ago

soon agents will live for us

the ~game~ matrix

oxonia•24 minutes ago

* Backfired * :-D

zkmon•about 1 hour ago

Talk about making a huge sale to a car sales-man and totally pawning them. Tech has evolved into next-gen "selling science".

ChrisArchitect•27 minutes ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446

gnabgib•27 minutes ago

Tune your bot, this is the 3rd time (at least) you've duped this dupe and deleted. You still have this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48704222

ChrisArchitect•24 minutes ago

And yet here we are with this submission still getting upvoted.

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446

dmix•about 1 hour ago

> This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware to do visual inspections.

htoqwiejqlekr•about 1 hour ago

Why are American tech-bros such loud-mouthed bullshitters ?

Reminds me of this disaster at Toyota,

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-wov...

zkmon•40 minutes ago

American tech is basically a sales machine. An ounce of tech will be coated with a ton of selling force. Everything in America is a business, presentation or a talk-show - including government, education, relationships. People do selling and faking to themselves sometimes.