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."
the-independent.com/tech/ford-…
Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly
‘We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers,’ says automakerAnthony Cuthbertson (The Independent)
Hank G ☑️ likes this.
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Kool Mo Di
in reply to evacide • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Kool Mo Di • • •Yeah, we don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Careless people ain’t never gotta take consequences
su_liam
in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to su_liam • • •Well, you and I are hardly the right kind of people. Only the right kind of people can be careless get away with it.
Matt Griffin
in reply to evacide • • •Scott Wright 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to evacide • • •James M.
in reply to evacide • • •Enema Cowboy
in reply to James M. • • •@jamesmarshall
Isn't one the reason why executive "merit" the big bucks is that they aren't so easily fooled by snake-oil peddlers?
"Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, another to listen."
-Homer Simpson
Kg. Madee Ⅱ.
in reply to James M. • • •Christian Rickert
in reply to evacide • • •reshared this
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Enema Cowboy
in reply to Christian Rickert • • •Who does Ford think they are? Civet cats?
@evacide
Christian Rickert
in reply to Enema Cowboy • • •Exactly! 🫘
Lykso
in reply to evacide • • •Brad Macpherson
in reply to evacide • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Brad Macpherson • • •Fix or repair daily
And
Fucking old rusty dump
Philip Rowlands
in reply to evacide • • •Bradley M. Kühn 🏳️🌈
in reply to evacide • • •This is a very useful article to have & is helpful in my current LLM-gen-AI work. Thank you very much for sharing it, as I'd surely have missed it otherwise.
Meta: it seems to me “greybeard” is an inappropriately gendered term. I don't see that term used in the article you linked to, and I note you put it in quotes, maybe to acknowledge that, but couldn't another term be used that doesn't refer to something usually identified gender attributes.
Veteran might be a good term here.
evacide
in reply to Bradley M. Kühn 🏳️🌈 • • •@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.
Bradley M. Kühn 🏳️🌈
in reply to 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!
em mohamed
in reply to evacide • • •der.hans
in reply to evacide • • •I read that as Ford spent 3 years moving to AI quality control in effort to return to the craptastic qualify of the 1970s US automotive industry
youtube.com/watch?v=4-Qj58o87s…
Ford Pinto (Top Secret!)
Leroy Mercer (YouTube)happyborg
in reply to evacide • • •and why did Ford believe that?
- wishful thinking + no regard for their employees + lies from those selling #GenAI
#LLM
AgnesBC
in reply to evacide • • •reshared this
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GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to AgnesBC • • •@AgnesBC
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
Joe Brockmeier
in reply to evacide • • •Maya Granade
in reply to evacide • • •Ricardo Harvin
in reply to 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.
Leonardo Fontenelle
in reply to evacide • • •Dźwiedziu
in reply to 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…
Dirk Hohndel
in reply to 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.
FurballsNHairballs
in reply to evacide • • •peachfront
in reply to evacide • • •withinity
in reply to evacide • • •Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏
in reply to evacide • • •disorganized tropical low
in reply to evacide • • •Nazo
in reply to evacide • • •su_liam
in reply to evacide • • •Old Hank Ford was a shitty old guy, but he knew where his market was coming from.
A good example of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons was billionaires thinking other billionaires will pay their customers.
Stuart Langridge
in reply to evacide • • •a chance for Ford engineers to make an old joke become real
filobus
in reply to evacide • • •For this reason ai for them seems a so good solution
But still they don't get it, for them it's all a issue of abstract numbers
Feisty
in reply to evacide • • •Dio9sys
in reply to evacide • • •Jon Roach
in reply to evacide • • •greybeard engineer here <narrows eyes meaningfully at article>
Thanks for sharing this.
Julescelt
in reply to evacide • • •dark_stang
in reply to evacide • • •Kirtai 🏳️⚧️
in reply to evacide • • •Shocked I say.
https://kolektiva.social/users/unsponsoredgeek
in reply to evacide • • •* Laughs in #TacomaGame * (Part II)
#ObsolescenceDay #Union
kolektiva.social/@unsponsoredg…
' profile=
2026-06-02 07:42:32
Katzedecimal
in reply to evacide • • •Soozcat
in reply to evacide • • •happyborg
in reply to evacide • • •alex9003
in reply to evacide • • •Tito Swineflu
in reply to evacide • • •I'm imagining that everything that came out of their machine shop looked like this:
Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
in reply to evacide • — (0.0.0.0/ 0) •Thanks for the intel btw
Shadedlady
in reply to evacide • • •my thoughts exactly
Frank Heijkamp
in reply to evacide • • •