Posted on 06/19/2023 8:34:09 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
The problem with equity (mandated outcome quotas) is two-fold.
First, there is the issue of fairness. Why shouldn’t the MOST qualified person be awarded the job/promotion?
Second, there is the issue of competence. It’s not that there aren’t qualified individuals within any particular group. It’s that the number of qualified individuals within any particular group is largely determined by the size of that group.
Everything else being equal, (and it’s not, really), any group will produce only a certain number of qualified individuals, while a group comprising four times as many individuals will produce four times the number of qualified individuals from which to select.
But math is hard. And racist, I suppose.
Competency bookmark
As the article correctly points out quotas for the incompetent lead to complex systemic issues—and in many cases it take years for the excrement to meet the rotating blade—with a dusty and confusing trail leading from the old hiring and/or promotion decision to the disaster.
I do know one company that hired an unqualified black man to lead a division—and it went from industry leader to bankruptcy in just two years.
That is rare—most of the time it takes much longer for the real world to intervene in a fatal way.
The sad fact is that the drive for diversity above all other criteria carries with it fatal disadvantages that are going to cause a lot of damage before they're rectified. I'll expand on two examples the author cited:
Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness.
In the case of the USS Fitzgerald it resulted in vital positions being occupied by people whose primary qualifications were sex over ship-handling. Seven sailors paid with their lives for the fact that training had, as well, been diluted from weeks-long classroom and field training to a set of DVDs and a pat on the butt. In the case of the USS McCain it was the deliberate delegation of ship-handling to automated systems that had recently been updated and which didn't work properly. Ten dead was the price.
The answer to all of this isn't "don't be a sailor," although that may be the inevitable outcome. Combat systems are classic systems and the degradation of their components means the degradation of overall performance. You might as well be building automobile parts with pot metal. They will fail.
The world is full of locations that were once thriving operations where now equipment rusts and buildings decay. The timeline between flaw in management and "for sale" is shortening rapidly.
My WAG is that one of the many many effects of AI will be to smoothe out the errors of the incompatents.
An easy way to understand this is that Tesla is getting close to producing driverless cars. Most car accidents are caused by human errors. (IN THEORY) AI will reduce the human error. Fewer human errors. Fewer accidents.
Good article, though a bit on the wordy side.
One factor not addressed is the outsourcing of jobs to third-world countries with third-world attitudes for how systems should operate, and the amount of failure within the system that is tolerated. I’ve seen this negatively impact multiple organizations.
Obviously more bureaucrats and regulations are needed.
I did consulting for a large aircraft manufacturer. They were DESPERATE for “diversity” (which was code for black) even though it was pretty evenly split between Indians, white Europeans, women, and “Orientals.” But there were no black people in the engineering department. So they went on a hiring binge and hired the most inexperienced, and frankly dumb, engineers to fill the roll of “token black man.” And entire division of the company was made just to keep them busy far away from the real engineering department and production line. Everyone knew the game but God help you if you said something about it or admitted you knew it.
An easy way to understand this is that Tesla is getting close to producing driverless cars. Most car accidents are caused by human errors. (IN THEORY) AI will reduce the human error. Fewer human errors. Fewer accidents.
As Artificial Intelligence (a fancy name for programming) expands, an even higher quantity of more competent minds will be needed in all the industries it touches.
As for the "self-driving" automobiles, they too require more individuals to oversee all limitless scenarios, many of which have already appeared.
-Who is liable for injury or death?
-How do emergency responders direct a computer-driven car to obey orders from a human? How do the programmers allow for such directions that conflict with the rules-of-the-road?
-Who even needs a drivers' license?
-Who needs to be of age to drive?
-Is there such thing as a drunk driver in a computer-driven vehicle?
-Tesla in particular never accounted for sleeping drivers and had to rewrite code to force drivers to handle the steering wheel every few moments or else the car would pull over and shut down.
-Who's responsible for contraband in a car driven by a computer?
As for most accidents being caused by human errors, how many of those were the driver, versus the mechanic (or owner that's not the driver), the roadway designer, the roadway construction crew, falling debris (including trees and mudslides), traffic signs that were damaged and not replaced, potholes, etc.?
I think that self-driving cars will experience frequent problems for who knows how long. After the majority of the bugs are worked out, it will be generally smooth sailing, with occasional unbelievably dramatic catastrophes, of the kind you get today when a veritable train of semi-trucks soar 80 MPH bumper-to-bumper in the fog.
Self-driving cars have great potential to meet the needs of the elderly who want to use their cars even if their hearing, sight and/or reflexes are seriously impaired.
As other posters have noted there are a lot of issues, some of them very challenging.
Hopefully they can be worked and resolved.
agree, there are many problems associated with driverless cars that mere AI does not address.
But imho you’re blinding yourself to the scale of the AI revolution coming. Musk himself said silicon valley should concentrate on manufacturing—because that’s where the big gains will come.
what I’m seeing right now is that AI is enabling people working at desks to do many multiples of the work they used to do in far less time. As well, AI is enabling people to pick up skills far more easily. Or to be more precise AI enables people to do jobs for which they have no skill. You don’t have to be able to write python. You just tell AI to write the python for you.So your skill is being a prompt engineer. Which is not really all that tough. Already there are growing libraries of optimized natural language prompt engineer commands. A person who understands prompt engineering well can do an incredible number of different jobs that would have been just impossible before because of the time it takes to pick up skills. I have heard silicon valley types say that in the future — it will take about 3 guys working together to make billion dollar companies—whereas in the past it took many 1000’s.
But they will get rich because they take decision making out of incompetent people’s hands.
That’s what AI does—for better or/worse.
Here’s a couple more examples. Say a doctor could feed an incredible amount of data about a patient into an AI and have the AI spit out a fairly accurate answer. Do the same for any other profession, for which there are a couple of really great practioners but also many incompetant people who just leave a trail of corpses in their wake.
You already have something like that for cars with car diagnostics. The mechanic doesn’t have to be all that smart. He just plugs in his diagnostics.
There’s also a plugin for your car that will enable you to diagnose your cars problems so that you can be on an equal playing field with the mechanic.
So its not too hard to see how the data decision tree could move up to the human body and to other professions.
There’s a lot more of this sort of thing going to happen than you can imagine.
Bureaucrats today and 5,000 years ago. People who did not create anything so they put themselves in the way so the people who do have to bow and scrape to get what is needed.
Halfway through reading it, I started thinking about the fact that throughout almost the entirety of America, you can safely drink the tap water and how I'd bet in twenty years, you will no longer be able to do so as we replace competent engineers with incompetent diversity hires and accept the new lower standard as normal. "It's always been this way!" they'll lie to us. "You've never been able to drink tap water!"
And not just tap water but every complex system in America.
You see this happening in South Africa. They can’t even keep the lights on anymore. Obviously, the previous system was not sustainable. But they replaced it with people who have no experience in doing what it takes to maintain an advanced development of civilization. So they’re going back to the Stone Age. Literally.
dotcode
Lotta words to say, “We ain’t got the smart and educated people we need to engineer things!”
I know many, many large companies that ain’t got the smarts to carry on into the future.
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