Ephera
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The AI uses natural language processing to “understand” the text explanation behind each error codes, said the engineer.

I mean, I’m glad it’s not just some dumb if-else chain, or even just basic circuitry, that’s being sold as “AI” here.

But at the same time: How did we get to a point where this is the best solution?

☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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Yeah, you’d think if they have the codes those should be more reliable than free text descriptions. I don’t see a scenario where you’d want to do natural language processing instead of just relying on the code to figure out what to do.

AI reading logs is actually a lot more common than people in smaller industries realize. It’s pretty much the modern way to tell the health of major systems, like AWS sub-components. Usually they call it “Log heuristics” or something.

What’s scary is services like Wise (for international banking) use it to determine when money goes missing… That’s how they find out a random bank in Sri Lanka that has no API updated their website and broke Wise’s RPA.

☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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For sure, but you can do structured logging. Every large project I’ve worked on logs JSON and that saves you a lot of time down the road. But yeah, a lot of systems out there just barf out random text in logs and then you’re stuck parsing that.

Ephera
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Oh, I can see that scenario. Mine was a rhetoric question, as I’ve been working in the data-shipping field for the past few years.

Thing is, if there’s a thousand power stations, there may well be a thousand different implementations + error codes, because for decades there was no need for a common method of error reporting.

The only common interface was humans. That’s why all of these implementations describe errors in human-readable text. And I would bet a lot of money that they’ve already had to extraxt those error codes from text logs.

Writing them out in e.g. a standardized JSON format, requires standardization efforts, which no one is going to push for while individually building these power stations.

That’s how you end up with a huge mess of different errors and differently described+formatted error codes, which only a human or human-imitating AI can attempt to read.

I mean, there’s definitely things they could have done that are less artificially intelligent, like keyword matching or even just counting how many error codes a power station produces. And I’m not sure you necessarily want a blackbox-AI deciding what gets power and what not. But realistically, companies around the planet will adopt similar approaches.

Ah ha, that explains a lot actually. I just realize how ignorant I’m about how power plants(and many other factories) were built before I was born and still running well today. And how costly it could be to upgrade them altogether.

☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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Yeah that’s a good point, if you have lots of disparate systems that don’t have standard coding then the codes wouldn’t be of much use. I can see how standardizing that sort of things would be a huge effort, so in that context the approach makes sense.

I also assume that the humans have the final say, but in most cases I imagine having the computer do the initial routing will get better results than doing nothing at all while humans figure out what the overall picture is.

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