Comment by TeMPOraL
9 hours ago
The way this will play out will be weird, and probably not like anyone expects. Because on the one hand, you're 100% right on the value of "feel" you develop for a system when you're around it daily for a long time. But, on the other hand...
The other day I visited our old apartment and noticed the dishwasher was making loud noises. Worrying about whether it's about to fail and whether I should call in a technician, I just recorded a bit of the noise, screenshotted a spectrogram from an app, made some photos, and threw Claude at it. It proceeded to analyze the recording and match specific frequencies to components of the machine, and gave me an analysis indicating the machine is operating normally, and the noise is just the pump being louder than I'm used to due to machine being old and a bit worn out.
So we literally have that kind of capabilities in our pockets, and this will compensate for the problem of missing experience somewhat, even simply because unlike low-paid frequently-rotating staff, LLMs are not lazy and will do the detailed troubleshooting work even off a recording and "wtf?" as prompt, so if you can train your cheap, expendable staff to do just that, that's already supercharges them.
I'm also amazed at the abilities of AI when I can verify them. But, how do you know that Claude is right about your dishwasher? I mean you're not that much worse off if it's wrong (compared with a similar medical query), but isn't this a case of trusting the AI without verification, just because it looks correct and was stated confidently?
I know enough to evaluate the analysis I got; I have some general expertise and worked in fields adjacent to this, which is why I had the idea to troubleshoot a dishwasher off an audio spectrogram in the first place. And on the off chance I was wrong, this is super low risk - would cost me extra few hours of my life at a less convenient time.
My point isn't that AI can substitute for expertise in general, not just yet, but that if you're competent enough to evaluate it, AI can absolutely do hours of work in minutes even for things involving troubleshooting on factory floor (or home appliances). And, that this is a lever where personnel on the floor may have sufficient expertise to evaluate diagnostic work, but not enough motivation or space to do the diagnostic work themselves.
At that point of low risk, why not just wait till it breaks and then get a replacement?
Seems the AI analysis added no value, but took, up time...
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