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The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong's Subway Engineers
Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptimes: 99.9%, which beats London's tube or NYC's sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10,000 people would be carrying out 2,600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the ones carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn't a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chun of Hong Kong's City University, who designed the AI system, says, "Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen." Chun's AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedule less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chun's team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong's AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chun. "We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works," he says.
In other words, this is basically Drools, plus a ton of billable consulting hours?
Everything currently run by committee should ideally be run by an AI with limited human oversight in the future. Groups of humans suck at the two things AIs are great at: remembering things and making decisions.
Laws, paperwork, unions, paperwork, regulations and paperwork wouldn't allow this to happen.
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I dunno. If a corporation smells a profit in it, then I think they'll find a way.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
This is a perfect example of an Expert System.
Expert Systems have been one of the most successful and longest used AI models in industry. FPGA routing and layout programs have relied on this form of AI since the early/mid 90's.
What we see now are the first steps towards making a big chunk of management obsolete. Expert systems are well on their way to out-compete managers who in many situations cannot make decisions of the same quality as an AI. Or to put it differently: An AI can make better decisions than a human in many areas. And in these areas humans (managers) will not be able to compete.
"People get scared when you talk to them about AI,"
Team Leader, please report to the debriefing room ASAP.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. It's those unions. Those ones whose membership has been steadily and measurably been decreasing for 30 years(almost exactly at the same rate as wage stagnation occurs, as a complete coincidence).
How small does Snowball's organization have to get before you stop believing he's behind everything?
This is far more common then you would imagine... The fact it's being applied to a subway system in this manner is pretty novel.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I have to see /. content two days after I saw it on reddit.
Is it called Manna?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
And nimbys
Anytime the NYC subway wants to shut down part of the system for maintenance, everyone complains and runs to their local political boss
Same in Long Island for the lirr. They are building a second track in a large part of the system and people who drive don't want the extra trains because it will make them wait longer at crossings
I would like to know how much efficiency was gained as a result of getting rid of the bureaucracy. That alone must have been worth quite a bit.
You won't even have to train the workers, they will have Google Glass like interface with which instructions sent from the AI tell the "human" what to do.
Humans will become the hands and feet of the AI.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Because HK's MTR is heavily overstaffed. For instance during peak times they will deploy an army of people to stand around holding signs, on Nathan Rd for instance a one way system it put into place for the entry and exit stairs for the stations. The above LED sign states that it is exit only or entry only. But two people are deployed to stand guard (which blocks the exit a tad) to hold signs saying exactly the same thing. Similarly down on the platform levels even though there are platform screen doors, you have armies of people standing there holding signs and little foam covered sticks to prevent people from getting on if it is too crowded. When I mean crowded I mean well over 100% capacity.
NYC system has a 24 hour schedule, the last I heard.
I think even the London may operate more hours than does the Hong Kong system (the link I found on service hours for H.K. was imprecise, i.e. [approx.] early morning to late at night every day of the year], which at worse comes close to the London hours of service.
Both NYC and London systems are both near one hundred or more years older, which means they are more maintenance intensive. Moreover, the former (and presumably the latter) are comprised of an amalgam of irrationally constructed competing systems that have been only partially made a more rational whole by closures, by new construction and by attempts to connect lines.
I know this does not address the supposed A.I. aspect, but a system built much later has advantages in the tools they employ.
The article was posted by someone who does not appear to have been around computers in industrial applications. Computers have been used for at least 4 decades for maintenance planning in large facilities as well as other areas such as transportation routing, product blending, production scheduling, etc. The maintenance activities for the London tube or the NYC subway are likely also being planned and scheduled using some sort of similar system even if the uptime result is not as good as Hong Kong.
Relevant. Must-read short story if you haven't.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
Public service unions are the major exception; the general decline is irrelevant when US mass transit is still almost completely union.
So, naturally, the next step is to fire all those people who would no longer have something to contribute. As a purely added bonus all these people fresh out of things to contribute happen to be with years and years of experience, which means seniority and high pay.
The mid level bean counter would think, "well, I should be able to fire at least 20 of them. Savings of 2 million on pay, another million in benefits, almost 10 mill over three years. Even if I have to let the SOBs CEO and CFO grab a mill each, I should be able to get at least 250 K for myself. Time to fire up power point, 'Work Force Optimization due to the increased Efficiency achieved by the AI system. By Gottah Avemyb Onus, Sr Vice President, Hatchet Division'"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not to mention that high-performing metro systems worldwide are highly unionized.
I'm thinking somewhere between "Altered Beast" and "Contra" - after playing through the subway tunnels, suddenly you arrive at the boss, a towering computer which hurls engineers at you.
Of course not for somthing as critical as maintenance planning and scheduling. But its OK for air traffic control functions. Where the consequences of a bad rule set are not nearly as serious.
Have gnu, will travel.
Unions. The word you are looking for is unions will never allow their work to be parsed by an AI that might increase productivity and might discern when crews are slacking and wasting time.
the general decline is irrelevant when US mass transit is still almost completely union.
Except for the decline in mass transit itself. It starts by eliminating Sunday service, then nights, then Saturday evenings, then Saturday service at all in the outskirts, and you end up getting one bus an hour if you're lucky.
I can confirm that London is indeed the same as NYC as regards slowly transforming a bunch of separate, competing services into a cohesive network. The different colored lines today approximately reflect the private company distinctions in the early network, and physical characteristics paint the rest of the story: some of the network runs in large tunnels originally built for steam trains, while other parts run inside small tunnels that were purpose-built for small-profile electric trains without exhaust.
"I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours."
vs
"From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could."
The fiction in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" is maybe to believe that the human brain could ever compete with a computer.
the world is gouverned not by gouvernments or bureacracy, but "business processes" and coorprations and their three-ring-binders with company procedures.
In other words, real life. Who do you think pulls the strings of legislators and regulators?
Your emotions on unions are irrelevant. Do you have any proof that unions would be heavily against replacing non-union management with a small shell script?
After 30 years of off shoring Unions are weak and ineffective in America. Laws can and will be changed. Paperwork can be automated and digitally stored and regulators can be captured.
The reason you're not seeing this in America is the top 1% won't pay the taxes for the infrastructure development, and they've got all the money. 1%ers don't use the subway...
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The article says that they're using a genetic algorithm. I'm no expert at AI, but my understanding is that an ordinary expert system doesn't use a genetic algorithm; an expert system just involves percolating propositions through a bunch of human-specified if/then statements.
I'd hazard a guess that the system described here is using the human-specified rules as part of the fitness function for the genetic algorithm. That's one way a system could use human-specified rules, but I think it's different from how an ordinary expert system uses them.
If you can call this an "expert system", then at a minimum, it looks like it's pushing the boundaries of the definition of "expert system".
If they started replacing management with expert systems that gave us
a) Increased autonomy
b) more pay (fewer managers and less dead weight at the top has to mean a few more dollars available for the rest of us)
c) Fewer stupid irrational decisions made for political reasons
Not only would you not hear a peep.
The computer would probably get presents on boss'es day.
Not my problem, I just want to get to work on time.
The maintenance stuff? Maybe if you closed after the rush-hour evenings (instead of daytime at weekends when MILLIONS of people travel on the Tube), you might get closer to fixing it.
But, to be honest, I'm 35, and the same arguments were being spouted by politicians and unions even before I was born. Fact is, in that time, we've added whole new lines covering vast swathes of London that were never covered before and are now spending billions to connect Birmingham/Manchester by a slightly faster line. The money we've spent pissing about over the last 50 years could have rebuilt the Tube system twice over.
And why are we running trains from the 70's still? Because no fucker will replace them, it's always "cheaper" to just keep patching them and reupholstering them every few years. It's excuses all the way.
And still, my personal "uptime" with the London Underground / Overground is actually closer to 80% than anything else. And that's being generous.
For 20+ years all I've heard is "We're shutting this down / spending this money" in order to make things work better in the long-run and cope with increased demand that we expect. And yet the trains are more crowded than ever, the platforms are too small for the amount of people waiting on them in rush hour, and still we get atrocious amounts of delays and cancellations (and, worse, can't even be bothered to announce such delays/cancellations until about 30 minutes after the train didn't arrive anyway - very useful).
Sorry, the system is old - that means we should know it inside out. It's underground, that means it shouldn't change at all over the years. And yet it gets more expensive every year to have a less reliable system. Remember when "the Circle Line" was actually a circle that you could go all the way around in both directions? Remember when you could change at the large interchanges etc. without having to wait YEARS for them to change an escalator?
That's when you get past the strikes of whatever-group isn't happy earning more than I do for pushing a lever forward or having a computer print a ticket. Which, honestly, add up to WEEKS over the last few years? And at the moment, the Tour de France has brought some stations to a grinding halt already.
There's no point in a mass transit system that isn't transiting people en masse. And that's the one thing we don't actually have happening. If it's that bad, throw it out and start again, and you'll find that - actually - a new system would probably cost you a LOT more than 100-year-old pre-dug tunnels that everyone knows where they are, where they go, and how to get to every one of the entrances.
The union crews work a given number of hours. Assigning them what to work on each day would be perfectly normal.
We already have it. Let's not allow facts and logic to actually change your narrative, you just go on being stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm in a union, and we do this. So you are wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OTOH the "Fast Track" programs have become more popular (or at least less disliked) because they demonstrably *work*. Close down a line for a long weekend and the job gets done, rather than "overnights only" taking multiple weeks. Some tasks just can't be done halfway.
Nicest subway system I've been on anyplace, bar none. A continuous amazement, built at scale. Many thoughtful design tips (f.e. your subway card can be used to pay at the nearby 7-11 (yes, a real 7-11), and you don't get held up at the turnstile when your balance is too low to get out ('cause you have an on-card deposit)).
If they're using this Expert System to help make it rock so hard, good on 'em. The USA could take a NUMBER of pointers from this thing.
Makes me recall the project I did for AI class back in university. Built an Expert System using VB (v6 probably) and Access (ya ya I know), where I took a pub that was a favorite in the City, that had 30+ different beers on tap. I then classified each beer by a number of different metrics (dark, light, ale, etc...). The user would then answer a number of questions about what their drink preferences were, and at the end, the system would spit out beer recommendations.
Was a pretty small easy fun system to build! As I recall I got a pretty good mark. Probably helped a lot of the professors used to frequent the pub. Wonder if any of them had some fun with the system "testing" how accurate it was....
The guy obviously has no clue. Look at ANY large IT project in the US.
1) Unions not involved. It is all outsourced to consultants.
2) Consultants hire overseas employees, and overcharge services
3) Blame government, make off like bandits with all the loot.
My favorite recent example was the 600 Million wasted by NY city trying to automate payroll called CityTime.
Please tell me how "Laws, paperwork, unions, paperwork, regulations and paperwork" caused that?
The same "Laws" that sentenced three of the contractors to over 20 years prison?
So much oversight and regulation that a 63$ million dollar contract was able to spend 700$ Million?
Soooo pretty much the EXACT opposite of what that guy is saying. Tighter control and responsible and answerable employees might make IT projects more feasible. However when you have no in house staff, because you outsource everything, well prepared to get hosed.
I'll even hazard that since corporations are now people, it's a slippery slope to the time that AI's that run corporations are also considered people.
Privatization is a mistake. It's just a way of incorporating someone's (sometimes obscenely disproportionate) profit into the cost of getting things done.
You aren't in a Union. Everytime someone mentions anything about a Union, you lose your Jesus just like everyone else around here are start throwing shit. You are simply trying to play Devil's Advocate and doing it poorly.
See also:
http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/spike/
http://www.stsci.edu/~miller/papers-and-meetings/93-Intelligent-Scheduling/spike/spike-chapter3.pdf
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
This just sounds like an expert system which they've had since the 70s or 80s, combined with a bit of planning/scheduling which is something they've had since then as well!
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Short and on this exact topic. http://marshallbrain.com/manna...