"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die
i know a lot of people study just to get paid well but girl this is engineering be for fucking real take this seriously
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.
So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.
We've already seen AI give incredibly bad advice in numerous fields, including stuff like trail directions and identifying mushrooms. Pretty sure some AI "therapists" have convinced people to do drugs or kill themselves or other harmful acts.
We've already at the danger point, if not past it.
Cool Canadian history moment 🇨🇦:
We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.
There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.
You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.
I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.
And if you genAI bullshitted your way through your degree, you didn’t earn your ring. How fucking dare you accept one.
I'm just thinking of this:
This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.
This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."
The building collapsed only five years after completion.
There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.
502 people died.
This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.
This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.
Something something Cybertruck....
Something something data center....
Something something AI.
An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.
What happens when the engineer doesn't know the owner should be stopped, because they let Claude get their degree for them?
If anyone wants mini-docs going into just what the hell went wrong with two of the three structures and the timeframes, here's these. He has a lot of other ones too, but these are the two mentioned in the post above.
