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no4mk1t

no4mk1t

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I hope they all got together and demanded a significant pay increase to pull Ford's ass out of the crack. 😎
It will be interesting to see what happens to CEO Farley who now has two clusterfucks under his belt. 🙄

Ford fired its veteran engineers to save money on AI. It just cost them billions.
The plan looked smart on paper. Replace expensive senior engineers with AI, feed it the design specs, let it pump out high quality cars for a fraction of the price.
Then reality showed up.
Ford became the most recalled automaker in America. 51 recalls. Over 11 million vehicles. And that's just the first half of 2026.
Turns out you can't just tell a computer "hey, make me a good car" and walk away. The AI needed clean data and human judgment to work, and the people who had both already got laid off.
So Ford quietly went and rehired 350 of those same veteran engineers. The ones inside the company call them the "gray beards." Their job now? Clean up the mess the automation made.
Here's the lesson that applies to way more than cars: AI is a power tool, not a replacement for people who actually know what they're doing. The companies winning with it are the ones pairing it with experience, not firing experience to chase it.
Experience isn't an expense. It's the thing that keeps the wheels on.
Would you trust a car fully designed by AI?

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no4mk1t said:
I hope they all got together and demanded a significant pay increase to pull Ford's ass out of the crack. 😎
It will be interesting to see what happens to CEO Farley who now has two clusterfucks under his belt. 🙄

Ford fired its veteran engineers to save money on AI. It just cost them billions.
The plan looked smart on paper. Replace expensive senior engineers with AI, feed it the design specs, let it pump out high quality cars for a fraction of the price.
Then reality showed up.
Ford became the most recalled automaker in America. 51 recalls. Over 11 million vehicles. And that's just the first half of 2026.
Turns out you can't just tell a computer "hey, make me a good car" and walk away. The AI needed clean data and human judgment to work, and the people who had both already got laid off.
So Ford quietly went and rehired 350 of those same veteran engineers. The ones inside the company call them the "gray beards." Their job now? Clean up the mess the automation made.
Here's the lesson that applies to way more than cars: AI is a power tool, not a replacement for people who actually know what they're doing. The companies winning with it are the ones pairing it with experience, not firing experience to chase it.
Experience isn't an expense. It's the thing that keeps the wheels on.
Would you trust a car fully designed by AI?

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Click to expand...

So-called "AI" is nothing more and no better than the HUMANS who PROGRAMMED the algorithms.

SO-CALLED "AI" is nothing more than a program that regurgitates what the HUMAN PROGRAMMERS wrote into it.
 
Racer88 said:
So-called "AI" is nothing more and no better than the HUMANS who PROGRAMMED the algorithms.

SO-CALLED "AI" is nothing more than a program that regurgitates what the HUMAN PROGRAMMERS wrote into it.
Click to expand...
All the more curious as to why Farley signed off on it. You would think he had advisors telling him that. :unsure:
 
I’m hoping there is not an AI induced market crash. Companies are investing 100’s of billions into AI data centers on a gamble that it will pay for itself. Given the recent and highlighted failures, it’s not looking like a sure bet for those companies, but all big companies are building them like gangbusters all over the US.
 
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Maybe when the entirety of human knowledge is integrated into AI programs then these things “might” improve, but I doubt it. Though I think that some things can be improved (still trying to figure out what), I am more concerned on how and where it will be used.
 
The morale of the story boys and girls is to not completely fix the AI...at least until right before you retire. 😈

This is not a story about human experience beating the machine. It is a cost calculation. Ford's AI quality systems failed badly enough to cost the company billions in recalls and warranty claims, and rehiring the veteran engineers it had pushed out turned out to be cheaper than keeping the broken automation.
The company has said that AI remains central to its plans, and the returning workers' actual job is to train and rebuild the same AI systems that replaced them. The moment that automation gets cheap enough to outperform their salaries, those workers go right back out the door.
Your value to a company like this was never your skill. It is whether you cost less than the machine this quarter.

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no4mk1t said:
The morale of the story boys and girls is to not completely fix the AI...at least until right before you retire. 😈

This is not a story about human experience beating the machine. It is a cost calculation. Ford's AI quality systems failed badly enough to cost the company billions in recalls and warranty claims, and rehiring the veteran engineers it had pushed out turned out to be cheaper than keeping the broken automation.
The company has said that AI remains central to its plans, and the returning workers' actual job is to train and rebuild the same AI systems that replaced them. The moment that automation gets cheap enough to outperform their salaries, those workers go right back out the door.
Your value to a company like this was never your skill. It is whether you cost less than the machine this quarter.

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I remember when a company I worked for was bought out and I was asked to train my replacement. I got them started but let them figure most of it out by themselves. No one taught me, I had to figure it out myself. My former employer was to cheap to spend money for proper training.
 
I got laid off from Xerox in 2007. Bastages outsmarted me and made my wife take over my job, so I pretty much trained my replacement.
To be fair, I was on 60 day "lay off notification" so I had to answer any question. The boss would ask her to ask me questions, and I started replies with "The first 60 days are free, then it's $100 an hour." The boss started telling her "I know the first 60 days are free, and then it's 100 an hour, but could you ask.."

If I was brought back and told to train the AI that would again replace me I would train the AI to tell whoever at Ford was writing the prompts to go fuck themselves.
 
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And now for ....... the rest of the story
We went back to my home country of Montana and bought a house after almost the whole 60 days, using both our Xerox pay to qualify.

We went back to the Portland area and she went back to work while we waited for closing. Every day she'd ask "Can I quit yet?"

When the banks called and said we were ready to close ( a few days before Xerox would have said 'He doesn't work for us anymore'), I called her, she quit, and we moved two weeks later.

I was still entitled to 6 months of pay as part of my severance, so we had time to find good jobs.
 
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no4mk1t said:
The morale of the story boys and girls is to not completely fix the AI...at least until right before you retire. 😈

This is not a story about human experience beating the machine. It is a cost calculation. Ford's AI quality systems failed badly enough to cost the company billions in recalls and warranty claims, and rehiring the veteran engineers it had pushed out turned out to be cheaper than keeping the broken automation.
The company has said that AI remains central to its plans, and the returning workers' actual job is to train and rebuild the same AI systems that replaced them. The moment that automation gets cheap enough to outperform their salaries, those workers go right back out the door.
Your value to a company like this was never your skill. It is whether you cost less than the machine this quarter.

View attachment 40342
Click to expand...
Management always think they are smarter than the people who actually do the job.
 
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