Magic AI plan to create bus route fails miserably

[Backroads]

It's kind of been a fun disaster to follow

Very geographically large school district doesn't have enough bus drivers. Hires a company who uses AI to create routes. Disaster ensues. School indefinitely cancelled.

My take: I get the desire to create efficiency on fewer bus drivers, but sometimes what you best need is pure manpower (bus power?)

[Vort]

I think this fiasco can be laid at the doorstep of the willingness of decision-makers to hit the Easy Button by putting the onus on a magical computer algorithm that they manifestly do not understand. This is Star Trek thinking. "Well, the computer was supposed to blah blah blah! Why didn't it work?!"

The threat is not that computers will do our thinking for us. The real threat is that, so often, we WANT the computers to do our thinking for us.

The irony about ChatGPT is that it's a computer, yet is really very bad at math. Very bad. Like, couldn't pass a basic math class past, say, arithmetic. (And maybe not that, if you're adding five-digit numbers.) ChatGPT is a language model, and responds to questions by trying to match linguistic patterns. Not really what you want with math or science.

[zil2]

5 minutes ago, Vort said:

This is Star Trek thinking. "Well, the computer was supposed to blah blah blah! Why didn't it work?!"

I just love when the computer tells them something and they ask it to verify / re-check what it just said, without any further input - as if a computer could come up with a different answer without further input.

Meanwhile, as to the school buses...  I agree, this seems like an "easy button" problem.  As a former driver and dispatcher, it's not that hard to plan routes, assuming you have all the data you need and know the city.  I wonder why it's so hard for them to hire enough bus drivers.  Perhaps the feds are paying too many people not to work.  I would consider being a bus driver (I did that in Moscow, Russia, after all), but only if there were another adult on the bus whose job it was to watch after the children - you can't do that and drive - and I'll bet they can't afford that, either.

[Backroads]

I've seen a few complaints that say "the system has never driven around here!"

[Backroads]

23 minutes ago, zil2 said:

I wonder why it's so hard for them to hire enough bus drivers.  Perhaps the feds are paying too many people not to work.  I would consider being a bus driver (I did that in Moscow, Russia, after all), but only if there were another adult on the bus whose job it was to watch after the children - you can't do that and drive - and I'll bet they can't afford that, either.

I heard in the teacher internet realm from those in the area that the bus driving jobs don't pay as well as other available jobs of similar skill level, and the retired folks who are driving bus because they're bored don't want to deal with the chaos of the kids. Multi-pronged.

I don't know what the unemployment is pay is like there, but at the same time if you're trying to hire, you sometimes have to compete for employees.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Backroads

[zil2]

2 hours ago, Backroads said:

I've seen a few complaints that say "the system has never driven around here!"

Yeah, it's not enough to know the roads - you have to know the traffic patterns, how the lights work, how the drivers behave, etc.  It doesn't take that long to learn all that - if you're driving 8+ hours a day all over the whole city, but folks these days think computers can do everything.

[Vort]

10 minutes ago, zil2 said:

folks these days think computers can do everything.

Thinking is the issue. Think: I think the problem is that folks think that computers can think. Our common language usage encourages and exacerbates this misconception. People don't understand what AI is. You have highly educated fools like the Google employee (I think?), issuing dire warnings that an AI has "achieved consciousness" or some such absurdity. What a situation we'll be in when our elected decision-makers start turning over crucial decisions to AI algorithms. It is probably already happening; the bus snafu described by @Backroads is one such example.

[Ironhold]

9 hours ago, Backroads said:

It's kind of been a fun disaster to follow

Very geographically large school district doesn't have enough bus drivers. Hires a company who uses AI to create routes. Disaster ensues. School indefinitely cancelled.

My take: I get the desire to create efficiency on fewer bus drivers, but sometimes what you best need is pure manpower (bus power?)

The issue is that for decades now American society has pushed "college is for winners, everything else means you failed" on a large scale. 

As a result, we have a dire shortage of many skilled trades, including heavy vehicle operators. It takes time and money to train someone to operate a school bus or similar vehicle as you have to have certain permits to operate them, and since school boards often don't have the money to train they have to dip into the scarce pool of people who do already have these licenses... people who have probably already been courted by trucking companies and metro bus groups. 

[mordorbund]

Before reading the friendly article, I figured this was probably a testing failure — as in a lack of testing. If the AI creates the model it should also have a way to test the model. You can do a base-level evaluation by having it validate the previous system and also include a fail model to see if it’s passing everything.

The other testing failure is running the buses on the route and using that feedback. I lived in one place where you would see the buses running a week or two before school started. I lived in another place where you didn’t see a bus until the first day of school.

I read the article, and the district seems confident that the new routes will work. They only tried the routes two days before school started. Either concerns weren’t raised or they were ignored. Might as well add that as another point of failure. Also, other articles may have mentioned AI, but this article only mentions algorithms (which is a really weak AI under some definitions).

I suspect that the reason the superintendent didn’t throw the tech company under the bus because it delivered on exactly what was asked — something like bus routes run only once (previous routes used multiple trips with late batches) with the number of drivers they currently have.

[Traveler]

You have to be kidding me – AI (experts) could not solve traffic patterns?  Rather than resort to AI there is a very simple and easy solution for traffic flow.  This can easily be solved by very inferior intelligence by utilizing slime mold – that has no brain or any brain (calculating) capabilities.

Slime mold was able to solve the most complicated and complex traffic patterns of Tokyo.  In 26 hours.

Here is the link:  https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-perfecting-traffic-networks.html

 

Note that the date on this link is around 12 years ago.

 

The Traveler

Edited August 16, 2023 by Traveler

[Vort]

15 hours ago, Traveler said:

Slime mold was able to solve the most complicated and complex traffic patterns of Tokyo.  In 26 hours.

Here is the link:  https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-perfecting-traffic-networks.html

Slime mold has long been underrated as a lab partner for shared assignments.