Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Greg and Dianna discuss how quality and reliability engineers can become AI boomers NOT doomers.Ā Engineers are being challenged with AI.Ā What can and should we do to survive and even prosper in the age AI disruption.
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Video Killed the Radio Star…went the 1979 music video byThe Buggles. MTV used this as their first ever video in 1981, but despite the prophecy and MTV’s 40 ongoing years, radio stars aren’t dead. Radio revolutionised popular music, vinyl discs gave us today’s disc jockeys but even though technology evolves it demonstrates that the fittest will survive and not everything will be killed.
Compact cassette started to challenge vinyl in 1963. With the emergence of CDs in the mid ‘80’s, tapes eventually became old-hat. CDs were ousted by flash drives and today ubiquitous access to downloads overshadow almost everything…but vinyl and tapes aren’t altogether dead and buried. People can be branded dinosaurs but sometimes they are just nostalgic; the odd scratch can make music more of a memorable memory…as does listening to cricket or baseball or horse-racing on the radio!
But it’s not just music that’s been influenced by technology. Meetings have also been affected and, with the advent of COVID more and more of us are being exposed to on-line meetings and, of course presentations. But how effective are some presentations in blending audiovisual media, the spoken word and that most important ingredient, people.
Dianna and Greg discuss your employability in the AI age.Ā So, let’s run a hypothetical.Ā You’re a 22 year old mechanical engineer.Ā You do robotic quality and reliability with a knowledge half-life of 4 years.Ā Ā That means by the time you’re 26 knowledge in your domain has doubled.Ā Let’s say, you’re now 30.Ā Knowledge in your domain has quadruped.Ā Problem:Ā you have not updated your knowledge skills and abilities.Ā Are you still employable.
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Greg and Fred discuss how and when to escalate problems and risks.
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The ability of machines to communicate—and their increasing intelligence—is an exponentially accelerating trend spanning many industries. This technology trend is not slowing down in any way, and the more it is adopted, the more it will continue to accelerate, transforming our personal, professional, and social lives.
How Tech Can Turn Doctors into Clerical Workers
Title of New York Times Article
I bounced the above article among several of my doc buddies. The conversation went like: “You spent 10 years going to med school. Now, you push paper. And, BTW: you may be replaced by a robot. Huh. Yeah. Well. ….”
Not good for one of the most respected professions. But, an undisputable sign of concern among one of the most lucrative and respected professions during the COVID pandemic. It’s all about medical disruption.
Evacuation management is a necessary element of safety planning for oil and gas operations. It is critical to be prepared to evacuate personnel quickly and safely in the event of an emergency, as every second counts when lives are on the line. Evacuation drills and preparation exercises can be disruptive and time-consuming.
However, the overhead costs and lost productivity expended in preparation for emergency scenarios have become accepted as unavoidable costs of doing business. That’s because until now, there hasn’t been an efficient way to manage and improve evacuation drills while still adequately preparing team members for real emergencies. [Read more…]
Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
John Carmack – Software Engineer
A number of years ago, several of us at Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) wondered what are the people implications of what is commonly called Moore’s Law. The 2020 edition of this book (pre-COVID) focused on AI and technology disruption.
Story: Gordon Moore was one of the founders of Intel Corporation. Moore’s Law states the number of transistors that can fit into a computer chip doubles every 18 months to two years. Moore’s Law expanded to include any tech area where the rate of change doubles in two years or costs half as much.
Greg and Fred discuss ways to detect and monitor changes in a system.Ā So, what is the trigger to indicate an event,Ā threat, or anomaly that can result in a risk.Ā This becomes critical if you want to focus on the critical few NOT the insignificant many.
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Organisations are systems that consist of sub-systems like sales and production. Change impacts the organisational system and subsystems in different ways and speeds – sales may react quickly to the changing external environment, but production may take time to change the process. Unfortunately, people are the hardest to change.
When organisational subsystems change at different speeds caused by external changes, it creates gaps or cracks in the system. This is where the system gets disintegrated.
A project controls colleague of mine recently wrote:
“Really, I never had to deal with delivery directors / managers who did not understand or appreciate the effort which goes behind a digital data fed dashboard”
Sarcasm, according to Oscar Wilde, may be the lowest from of wit but it’s the highest form of intelligence. While being humorous at the expense of those who demand dashboards it’s a sad truth that most demanders have no idea as to the effort required in producing a dashboard. For them dashboards can be instantly tailored to any whims or fancies at the flick of a switch or the stroke of a key on a keyboard.
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” (Gordon Gekko, ‘Wall Street’ movie, 1987)
When energy-trading company Enron declared bankruptcy in 2001, it was the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. Enron’s execs were pocketing millions while knowingly overstating the company’s earnings to shareholders through fraudulent accounting.
“Greed is good” even in the highly regulated financial services sector. UK’s Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards sums it up nicely when it says, “Too many bankers, especially at the most senior levels, have operated in an environment with insufficient personal responsibility. Top bankers dodged accountability for failings on their watch by claiming ignorance or hiding behind collective decision-making. […] Remuneration has incentivised misconduct and excessive risk-taking, reinforcing a culture where poor standards were often considered normal. Many bank staff have been paid too much for doing the wrong things, with bonuses awarded and paid before the long-term consequences become apparent. The potential rewards for fleeting short-term success have sometimes been huge, but the penalties for failure, often manifest only later, have been much smaller or negligible. Despite recent reforms, many of these problems persist.” – with emphasis (Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, 2013)
Greg and Fred discuss the importance of key metrics, whether KPI’s or OKR’s, to determine the quality of decision making.
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Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
Marc Andreessen – Venture Capitalist
We’ve been involved in engineering and tech automation for years. What surprises us is the observable breadth, depth, and impacts of automation (AI included) over the last five years, which COVID accelerated. What’s the big deal about automation?
Greg and Fred discuss what happens when a company doesn’t have the engineering knowledge, skills, and abilities to design things.Ā Why?Ā Companies don’t make commodity stuff any more.Ā They outsource these items.Ā The challenge of outsourcing often means outsourcing engineering expertise.Ā Big problem.Ā So what are the solutions?
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