Chopsah2
We're trying to continually improve the AI so that its time in control is maximized, much like Waymo's early days with self-driving car software + safety drivers.
What About the Jobs?
With more and more of the company’s data centers shifting to automated infrastructure control, and with the real possibility that the same will eventually start happening outside of Google, arises the inevitable question of jobs. Are Google’s data center engineers engineering themselves and their colleagues out of work?
So far, Kava hasn’t seen evidence of that happening.
“We still have people there, because they still have to do all the maintenance,” he said. “So, you’re not getting rid of the people, you’re augmenting” the existing team’s capabilities. “Instead of trying to tune the system themselves, they can focus more of their time on preventative maintenance and corrective repairs.”
Besides, AI still does poorly in situations “outside of the envelope of its training,” he said. People are very good at making observations in what Kava likes to call “corner cases” and coming up with a course of action on the spot. AI isn’t.
In other words, it’s a good idea to have AI fine-tune a cooling system to improve efficiency in pre-tornado conditions, but you better have some human engineers around in case a tornado forms.