Construction Curiosities #104
Tackling AI Trust Issues | Theming your Days
Hey! Happy Saturday! Matt here.
Welcome to the Construction Curiosities newsletter!
This weekly Newsletter explores the Curiosities of the Construction Industry. It's meant to help Drag the Construction Industry into the 21st Century by making you think, smile, and become motivated to drive innovation in your realm of the industry.
The Newsletter will focus on 4 primary areas of Innovation:
Technology & Tools
Growth Marketing
Upskilling/ Mentorship
Being People First in all of the Above
We won’t hit on each of these topics every week but that’s what is in rotation!
Summary
This week we will look at:
One Guest Post: Tackling AI Trust Issues
One Video: Always will be money in the skilled trades
One Social Post: Theme your days
One Meme: Don’t…. Stop….
Tackling AI Trust Issues
by Ido Glanz & Yael Meretyk Hanan/ Pelles.ai
As the hype around AI continues to grow (and rightfully so), the issue of trust arises as a potential setback. While it’s important to establish trust in any tool you use, weighing in the stage AI is at, together with the potential it brings, we feel it deserves a bit more slack, and maybe even a shift in the way it is criticized. Below is our take on trusting AI.
Probably the very first thing you should do is stop judging AI like a professional and more like a power tool.
You don’t expect a new welding machine to make perfect beads in the hand of an intern, nor would you expect an electric drill not to drill through a water pipe hidden in a wall. You should, though, expect the new welder to allow faster, stronger welds with less training time, and the electric drill to exponentially save time on anchor installation, even in the hands of less experienced personnel.
The point is, that even the greatest, most high-tech tools are still tools, and both their effectiveness and safety are upon their operator.
Taking the first few steps
Luckily, AI won’t cut your finger off if used incorrectly, but it would still give you rubbish if used poorly.
On the other hand, with even basic understanding and some exploration, it can save time, create content, mitigate risks, and much more - probably a lot faster than mastering an angle grinder.
On your path to AI, try and start off in these footsteps
Naturally depending on your experience and knowledge, we found the following beneficial to kick off with when introducing AI to your workflows
1. Read a bit about it and how to use it
AI is a broad and general term for algorithms undertaking human-like tasks, from utilizing natural language, to understanding images and creating content. While all under the AI family, different models serve different purposes and are designed for different tasks. Using the right one is key to a successful outcome. You can read more about different types of models in our previous blog.
As for usage, our advice here, and contrary to any power tool instruction, is to be curious and explore. Try different inputs, tweak whatever’s tweakable, and watch for change. Understanding the effects of input variations is crucial to harnessing AI's full capabilities.
2. Understand its limitations and have realistic expectations
Don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but AI is a statistical tool. Thus, it can, and probably will make mistakes, especially when used for things it hasn’t been trained on doing. Contrary to what the currency hype might suggest, AI is yet to be a general-purpose, all-knowing tool.
Have realistic expectations from these tools and be suspicious if anyone promises you the moon.
3. In the time being, AI is here to help, not replace
Especially in domain-specific tasks, your expertise and knowledge are still irreplaceable, but having AI take-on the tedious, repetitive, often overlooked tasks, can increase throughput and boost your confidence significantly. Nevertheless, you are still signing-off the output (and more importantly in the construction industry, laying the bricks or installing the system), make sure to always verify your outputs and use your common-sense.
4. Demand explainability and transparency
Don’t accept black-box solutions, look for AI tools that provide a means of explainability to their output and transparency to their process. From presenting the data sources (to the extent of specific texts), looping you as a user in the process (even by plainly asking “Did you mean this or that?”) and allowing you full flexibility to tune and iterate your outputs.
Not only will this prove more useful to you, but it would also push the industry to build better, more trustable tools.
While it might sound like throwing off responsibility, it’s really about setting you up for success, even in these early ages of AI, while behind the scenes, we can mature AI to a more robust, general, and useful state.
Understanding trust is fundamental to any new technology, and especially one with such high capabilities, we try to build our software to be as transparent, interactive and grounded as possible. From providing context, employing human-in-the-loop workflows and creating explainable chains, our goal is to make sure you as a user can see from where data is derived, control how your query is interpreted and iteratively tune the required output (implicitly tuning the algorithms as you do so)
Utilizing agentic workflows, a latest advancement in AI pipelines, which loosely speaking is a means to orchestrate different AI algorithms together to create flexible, agile workflows, we can break the black-box paradigm and create loop-holes and hooks to bound, restrict, and direct AI pipelines, mitigate hallucinations and misdirections and provide relevant, specific and refined outputs.
While someday there might be an all-mighty AI algorithm to rule them all, for the time being, domain-tailored AI toolkits are proving to be the go-to for industries like construction. Where domain knowledge and expertise, together with the criticalness of outputs are an inherent trust barrier for AI to cross. We believe taking the time and effort to harness AI at its early stages will arise as a long-term differentiator, giving you an unfair advantage towards the future of construction.
Want to be featured in a future Construction Curiosities Newsletter???
Want to be featured in a future Construction Curiosities Newsletter like AJ??
Welp, here’s your chance
There are only a few rules:
1. The Article has to be about something in the Construction Industry (duh)
2. The Article needs to be long enough to cover the topic but not a novel!
3. I get to insert Memes & Gifs within the article 😁
Submit your articles here: Construction Curiosities Guest Article Submission
One Video
This is a clip from CM Mentors # 30 w/ Guest Chris Gutkes.
Even though I tried. You can’t razz the Razzler.
Chris and Island Elevators is launching their Youtube Channel.
What’s it about?
In his own words:
Subscribe here to follow along:
Subscribe to the Island Elevator Youtube Channel
One Social Post
Continue reading on Linkedin: HERE
One Meme
Sometimes you gotta learn lessons the hard way…
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See y’all next week! ✌
