I have ordinary addictions.

Source

*freeze frame*

Its similar to why you cannot put bad people in a class of their own. The moment you do that you stop being able to see the bad things that the people closest to you do a la "my best friend couldn't have said that racist thing, they're not evil."

The moment you think you are immune from this type of backslide into right wing nonsense is the moment you stop questioning yourself enough to keep yourself from backsliding into right wing nonsense a la "I mean im not antiscience, im vaccinated, I just think that fluoride in our water supply is imparting children's ability to learn as fast as they otherwise could without it."

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

It is important not to walk away from it thinking "but I'm not going to be an engineer, so that's fine."

In my adult life, I have (among other things) run a small business, I have managed a bank branch, and I have been a mortgage processor. In any one of those three jobs, not knowing the exact correct laws and procedures for what I'm doing could really fuck up someone else's life.

If I don't set up payroll correctly, I could create a huge disaster for myself and employees, either immediately or come tax time. QuickBooks keeps trying to get me to let AI manage my payroll and I would rather stab myself in the hand.

If I didn't handle deposits and Fincen reporting correctly in my branch banking days, I could end up accidentally committing many many crimes and making it harder for people to catch some of the really big, really terrible crimes. (Hint: this was important to uncovering all the Epstein shit!) That's not even counting all the actual cash I was responsible for. (It makes me want to throw up thinking about the fact that I literally handled about a million dollars in cash every week for 2 years.)

If I didn't handle my mortgage processing exactly right, people could lose their homes. I cannot stress enough how easy it is for shit to get REALLY FUCKED UP if deeds and mortgages are not filed exactly right. People get their homes (legally!) stolen from them every year.

1. My seriousness for protection of minors in all fonts regardless of how the company wanted me to handle it, I was very serious about meeting my states legal requirements.

2. The amount of Ai being used in disability services to cut corners on everything from emails to reports. Including people using it to write the meant to be personalised notes.

And at this point in time, despite being new and plenty of people saying that it was not a reliable or good idea and was absolutely a privacy risk; multiple companies and fields around us were having it become not just common office practice but written in to the company meetings that it was allowed and encouraged in some ways. (Despite absolutely not making writing an email any shorter than my own personal method of keeping a word document for it so I could copy paste whatever I needed into an email and have it available).

This has lead to constant issues; people's claims getting rejected because instead of local law it was being written to an American 'standard' (who knows if it even met any state disability laws there either), information leaks and privacy breaches, constant bad advice that's not relevant for clients needs bc Ai writes generic file notes that aren't actually relevant to the clients conditions, etc.

Ai is dangerous for everyone, especially the most vulnerable and those who will be brushed off when they voice concerns.

And the thing about people who try to make a fuss about it within a workplace by calling out its mistakes and refusing to use it; is we just become ignored and moved out of and away from projects.

Which means you have less oversight from those who'd pick it up, or it'll take longer to pick up because Ai constantly makes small mistakes that are ignored and need to be corrected so it takes longer for the larger ones to be seen. If it's something that even actually gets multiple layers of checkpoints, which a lot of things aren't.

People are lazy with checking Ai.

They assume because they've 'given the correct parameters' that the task has been met to a standard they want.

And then because it's done in a shorter amount of time than actually writing and proofreading a report would take, companies up the workload and demand more of employees, meaning even more mistakes get missed.

Ai in basic admin jobs will lead to people being harmed because anything that requires reporting has a layer of impact, whether legal, financial, medical or other.

Especially in the medical field, Ai is going to hurt people. Not just because of bad Ai google summaries, but because inaccurate reports written by a machine that misrepresents information will absolutely get people killed.

It's been a problem experienced due to dismissive doctors and nurses, what happens when someone already dismissive decides to use Ai and not even re-read their prompt let alone the answer they receive?

But I'm terrified about when the software starts hallucinating numbers. I can catch some things, but it is going to be decades before we really realize the impact of these issues.

and then this kid, this one kid who is always very eager to answer questions and is always kind to his classmates, raised his hand looking a little bothered. now for context, i emphasize thinking for yourself in my classroom, even if that means disagreeing with something i say and he has echoed some stuff that his parents clearly have told him before. he's not a bad kid or an asshole, he's just an 18 year old with conservative parents who otherwise knows nothing about politics. but he just looks so bothered after i explain this about dirty arguing techniques. big frown on his face. looking unsure. when i nod at him to speak, he says, in a very quiet voice, "didn't -- didn't charlie kirk used to do that?"

and i was like. well yes. yes he was famous for stuff like this.

and then the kid looked down and was just like, "oh. i thought he was just really good at debating. i never watched his videos though, only clips. why would he do that?"