Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. On this podcast, talk about boiler industry topics and personal development. Wild is part of the name of the podcast. Wild actually stands for something. It stands for work hard, invest yourself, lead others into develop yourself into a person of excellence. We should always strive to be better. And today I hope you are getting better. And if you're listening to the Boil Boiler Wild podcast, I know you care about improvement.
Eric Johnson (00:28)
Because you are here to learn and hopefully I can teach you something and share some of my knowledge and experiences. On this one, I got a interesting scenario that hit the news, and you probably haven't heard about it unless you're really into news. But this is one where it is an issue in the boiler industry. While this one is unrelated to the boiler industry, it is
Eric Johnson (00:56)
Very, very applicable. first of all I wanna credit where credits due. This is not sponsored, but I am getting my information from four four media and that is a website, looked like it started three years ago. Well, I guess it's a company as well, but they report on things and they're not like a traditional news outlet where it's just kind of surface level reporting.
Eric Johnson (01:23)
But if you search this story, there's some other larger news organizations where they report on this story, but their source is 404 media. So I just went straight to the source. And I would actually recommend it. the website, 404 Media. You got to give them your email to read the article that I'm going to be talking about. But I've actually enjoyed the other emails that they've sent.
Eric Johnson (01:53)
They don't spam you and they just send a very inf informational email about other articles and stuff that's happening in the world. And it's always like interesting stuff like investigations. It's not just like general news. It will be a story just like this one that I'm talking about. And this is just something good to think about and be aware of and how your job role relates to the rest of the industry.
Eric Johnson (02:22)
So the article is titled Show How Three is Zero Percent at Fault. Expert Witness used Chat GPT to write report defending company in deadly explosion lawsuit. Chat GPT prompt shows how an expert witness report was created in a sixty one million dollar lawsuit over an explosion that killed three people.
Eric Johnson (02:42)
I'm gonna read the first paragraph and then talk about it. But the first paragraph gives you an idea of what's happening. An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroying roughly 200 homes used Chat GPT to write significant portions of his expert report. An expert report is in quotations. The man who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate, 3M,
Eric Johnson (03:09)
Exposed his AI prompts publicly. They showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M and that the report should show how 3M is zero percent at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding. And that may trigger a memory of yours, Watson Grinding, if you are up to date on
Eric Johnson (03:35)
The US Chemical Safety Board videos probably the best YouTube channel for safety on YouTube. the US Chemical Safety Board is probably one of the few ways I feel good about my tax dollars being used. And if you don't know the US Chemical Safety Board, they have a YouTube channel and they do investigations into incidents around chemical. I know they're the chemical safety board, but it's not always chemical related.
Eric Johnson (04:03)
But they'll tip it's it's typically something to do with industrial facilities manufacturing.
Eric Johnson (04:10)
And Watson Grinding was a facility it that had an explosion in twenty twenty. They had a gas leak and people came in in the morning and gas leak it was some kind of explosive gas. It wasn't I don't think natural gas. But the people came in in the morning, they smelled gas and they went to investigate and they flipped on the lights and that caused a spark. Blew up the facility, killed three people. the US Chemical Safety Board has a
Eric Johnson (04:39)
Great video on it. If you just look up on their YouTube channel, every other video on the US Chemical Safety Board YouTube channel is great as well.
Eric Johnson (04:49)
So why am I talking about this when this has nothing to do with boilers? this is really something you have think about when it comes to
Eric Johnson (04:56)
w your job, no matter what you are, whether you're a service technician, whether you're just in sales, if you're an actual engineer, if you have a professional engineering license, this is just something to think about and this is why you have to self-police yourself because the easy way out isn't always easy. But what I found interesting was if you go to the website of this engineering firm
Eric Johnson (05:25)
called Nighthawk is the engineering firm. They have forensic engineering. They have a little paragraph on one of the services that they provide. And it says, you know, we're not the primary focus is providing engineering services, but we also provide engineering expert witness evaluations and testimony in complex cases. So what happened was 3M hired this engineering firm and paid them ninety thousand dollars for this guy to
Eric Johnson (05:54)
Do an expert witness testimony thing and in the blurb on the website for the Nighthawk says, although providing expert witness services is not our primary business, we feel that fact only enhances our credibility and proves our experts more resistant to accusations of results based testimony. the irony of that
Eric Johnson (06:18)
sentence is off the charts because that's exactly what happened in this case where 3M paid ninety thousand dollars and I'm not all into how the expert testimony stuff happens, but obviously three is hiring this engineering firm to try and prove that they were not liable or less liable for the accident at Watson grinding. And how does three play into this? They somehow it was something to do with the
Eric Johnson (06:47)
Hoses and the crimp on the hoses and also the gas detection system. I'm not a hundred percent sure on the details of how they're involved in this, but essentially they are trying to reduce their liability and they are hiring supposedly an expert. And this guy, this engineer that works for this engineering firm, is supposed to use his knowledge and to put together a
Eric Johnson (07:17)
unbiased expert witness of you know this is what I believe happened as far as like the liability and what ended up happening is he used chat GPT to try to write a expert witness testimony to show how 3M is zero percent at fault for the explosion at Watson grinding and this only came out because
Eric Johnson (07:43)
during the deposition they noticed that the
Eric Johnson (07:48)
Work cited was AI generated and then they
Eric Johnson (07:54)
Asked for the rest of the prompts and the prompt that he used is I am being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them at their lawsuits and other illegal proceedings behind the January 2020 explosion at Watson Grinding in Houston, Texas, primarily around process safety management. I need to create an expert witness report to defend 3M standard of care for their work in calibrating and commissioning.
Eric Johnson (08:23)
Return to operations, RTO, the ITrans gas detectors. I need to show that 3M met the standard of care and why. I will provide a link to the CSB report. Provides the link and like provides his career transcript, his C V and some other things to try to get AI to put together.
Eric Johnson (08:49)
a report and then he also provided reread all attachments and prompts and create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care of 3M illustrating the lack of PSM which is process safety management and safety by Watson grinding defeating nightlingers comments and unbiased assumptions example go work on something that you're not authorized, trained or permitted on and show how 3M is zero percent at fault for the explosion at Watson grinding.
Eric Johnson (09:16)
And how my background experience is well suited to render this professional opinion. So this engineer got caught out in this. and I'm not trying to pile on the guy, but there's a lesson learned here. And if I was getting paid ninety thousand dollars to provide a report to in a court case, especially for a company the size of three I would be scared to
Eric Johnson (09:46)
Be relying on AI. And this just plays into a bigger, more dangerous assumption is that AI can think for us and that AI is intelligent. And while artificial intelligence is in the name, it's not actually intelligence. It's just prediction. And if you don't know how AI works, it it it essentially generates what it thinks most likely is what the answer is. So it's based on
Eric Johnson (10:15)
Reasoning. So if you say what is two plus two, it doesn't actually know what two plus two is. It's not actually intelligent, but it looks at all of its data that it's been trained on and it goes, Okay, according to all this data, I can safely assume that two plus two is four. It doesn't actually think for itself, it doesn't it hasn't learned in the way that learn humans learn and can think.
Eric Johnson (10:45)
AI, if you just say, Hey, design me a rocket that goes to space, unless it already has the plans or ability to design that rocket, it is not going to come up with something new and just invent some new patent, new something where it is going to set be where humans go,
Eric Johnson (11:10)
Now we can go to space because this rocket was designed by AI. Where it can, and it is exceptional at, is it can look at data and do some data analysis, which is what a lot of people are using it for. But if you are using it to actually think you are not using it correctly, and this would be a misuse of AI, and I am not sure how this
Eric Johnson (11:36)
goes along with being a professional engineer and you know there's this whole creed about being a professional engineer and I would say that this goes against the creed. But basically what happened is
Eric Johnson (11:50)
The guy ended up admitting that the report was eighty-five to ninety percent gen generated by Chat GPT, which is an an an AI model. And in further prompts, he went into you know, his initial prompt show said show how 3M is zero percent responsible. But then he also went into further prompts of well, how is the defense gonna look into and question this? And the AI was
Eric Johnson (12:18)
Saying, like, well, it's kind of hard to show that they're zero percent responsible like that. Seems like it's you know, cause that's very binary. Like you have zero responsibility in this. So then he adjusted that and you know, took that phrasing out of there. But what does this mean for boilers? So this guy, and I don't know his thinking and I don't want to make assumptions, but basically he
Eric Johnson (12:43)
thought he could shortcut his experience and just say, hey, AI has more intelligence than I have. I'm going to outsource my thinking. And that can be very, very dangerous in the boiler world if you are not properly trained to have some bookmarks and have some boundaries around what you're using AI on. And I see this and it's going to be more and more of an issue.
Eric Johnson (13:09)
where training is not being done and people are being thrown into situations and they are using AI and you can, you know, pull up AI and he you know, open up your camera and it can kind it'll know what's in front of you. It can tell you about some general stuff, but it will always spit out an answer. It will never say I don't know, but it'll spit out an answer because it tries to
Eric Johnson (13:38)
Be useful and it tries to, I don't want to say please the human, but there is another thing with AI is that it will agree with you. And I have shown this in a little testing, in that if you have a bias in your prompt, it will typically go with that bias, and then if you challenge that bias later, the AI will go, wait, you're right, and then it'll change its opinion. So
Eric Johnson (14:09)
What does this mean for the boiler world? One, if you're being hired by another company, if you work for a boiler service contractor, if you work for a boiler manufacturer, if you work for an engineering firm, if you're being hired by another company, you are the expert, whether you think you're the expert or not. The other company is hiring you to solve a problem, to do something that they believe that they cannot do. And you have the responsibility to
Eric Johnson (14:38)
Be the expert to look at the situation and to come to a conclusion or to come to a resolution or install whatever, if you're installing a boiler room, to put together a system that works and is up to code and aligns with the best practices of the industry. And if you believe that AI is just going to be able to do that, while it can help, if you rely on it.
Eric Johnson (15:05)
a hundred percent and you outsource your thinking to it, you are sorely mistaken and you are going to miss a lot of things because AI is not actual intelligence. It is just prediction based with data and we are not there yet in order to
Eric Johnson (15:24)
Provide full engineering services with AI. Maybe we get there, maybe we don't. I go back and forth on what it's actually useful for, but seems like we are in a bubble and they are gaslighting us on AI and its usefulness. a lot of huge companies are walking backwards on AI replacing all humans
Eric Johnson (15:45)
what does this mean in the boiler room? If you are going to go do some safety checks on a boiler, you are the expert. Nobody is coming after you to check that you are doing it correctly. If you are installing a boiler, you are the expert. Nobody is coming after you to check that you are doing it correctly. Yes, you have state inspectors, yes, you have insurance inspectors, but even then, they are not the all knowing expert that are gonna come behind you and check.
Eric Johnson (16:12)
They miss things all the time. They are more and more these days severely undereducated as well. Just because they have a title of state inspector or insurance inspector, that doesn't mean that they're gonna catch all safety issues or that the boiler installation is gonna be correct. You have to be the expert. You have to be the one that is going to make it sure it's correct and make sure that it's done right. And it takes a lot of integrity.
Eric Johnson (16:41)
It takes a lot of thought. It takes a good team. That's why hiring a great company for service to your boiler room, operations to your boiler room, that is so important because a great team, while one person is not the expert on everything, they have access to resources about people with actual real world experience and knowledge that can put together a great product in the boiler room and for for whatever that product is. But if you are relying on
Eric Johnson (17:10)
artificial intelligence to tell you what to do and you ha are blindly following what it is telling you. You have lost the plot and that is a very dangerous situation. I go back and forth on AI and companies are always going to go to the lowest denominator. And basically where we're headed is AI and companies they will train their own special AI or they'll use some other AI
Eric Johnson (17:40)
That maybe that they were sold, and it's already coming where people or companies are gonna say, Hey, we don't want you to think we've trained our AI, we've spent a lot of money on this AI. You know, this AI costs us ten thousand dollars a month subscription. We want you to ask it what the diagnostic is. We want you to put in the problem and put everything in, and it will tell you what to do. So we don't have to train you, we just want you to use this AI.
Eric Johnson (18:10)
And we want you to listen to it. We don't want you to think you're just there to perform the repair, but we've trained it and where this essentially goes is we don't rely on humans to think and we are essentially trying to make humans robots and humans to think like computers.
Eric Johnson (18:33)
And there are so many like the human brain is so complex and we take in so many data points from our senses that we are ver we are making the human experience and boiling it down to almost nothing. And companies are trying to take the human experience out of the job, which relies on the human experience in the fact that yes, humans don't know everything and using AI as a tool is
Eric Johnson (19:03)
one thing that's just like using tools out of your toolbox or using the internet and, you know, looking up static pages. But using AI to actually think for you and to think for your employees and to actually put it above actual training and thinking
Eric Johnson (19:20)
Is a whole other world and you are essentially putting your trust in this black box and while that's fine for how do I do this home project in the boiler room? If you are saying, Hey, will there be any voltage on this wire? And if your employee doesn't know how to check voltage, if they say, Hey, I've done this and this, is there any steam pressure on this pipe?
Eric Johnson (19:51)
Is this isolated? Like the AI will tell you and generate anything it wants, but if you don't have any experience around what it is telling you or what it you are asking, you can get off the rails way too quickly. And now you are opening yourself to
Eric Johnson (20:12)
Getting hurt and killing people, which is a very dangerous precedent. And what this comes down to is you have to be the expert, whether you feel like you're the expert or not. And there are degrees of expert, but once again, if you are doing safety checks on a boiler and you are checking a low water cutoff and maybe, you know, it's the end of the day or whatever, and you're like, it's not tripping, but
Eric Johnson (20:42)
I don't know why it wouldn't trip, 'cause it seems like it's tripped before, in the logs it's tripped before. I'm just gonna mark it off. Nobody will know. I'm probably doing something wrong. Or you wire something up and you jump out a switch and you just say, well, you know, that's just the air switch. The blower motor always comes on. We've never had the air switch issue, but we need production to run. Let me just jump out the switch until we can get another one. It'll be fine. It hasn't been an issue before. We've done it before and there hasn't been anything
Eric Johnson (21:12)
wrong or going on or hey we've started up this boiler and we know that when starting the boiler you're supposed to warm it up slowly but the problem is is we need production and we're late on warming it up. So every week when we started up we've gotten later and later and we've not followed the process for warming up the boiler and now we just kick it into high fire and it warms up super fast. It's fine because nothing's happened before. So it's not going to be an issue.
Eric Johnson (21:40)
Maybe the issue will come down the road, but we're not gonna worry about it today. And you kick the can down the road. And what happens is basically you are telling yourself and telling other people around you that just because it hasn't happened before means it's not gonna happen. And accidents happen to everybody. There's no person in the world that says, Hey, we're gonna have an accident today or that air switch
Eric Johnson (22:07)
Yes, we're gonna jump out the air switch today, but that's when the boiler's actually gonna need the air switch because the blower motor is gonna trip and not come on and it's gonna be firing or try to fire without air getting pushed into the boiler. You are making assumptions that you cannot accurately conclude when you are jumping out.
Eric Johnson (22:33)
Safeties or you are installing a boiler and you don't actually make sure that it is correctly installed per the manufacturer's instructions or per the local codes, and you just say, Hey, well, we installed it and it passed inspections, so it must be correct. Now you can also assume or you may assume that, well, just because the boiler runs means that it's correct. Well, that I've seen plenty of installations where
Eric Johnson (23:00)
Boiler has passed inspection by the state or received a okay to run by the state or by the jurisdiction. And there have been code issues, or there have been code issues for 10 years, and they say, Well, it passes inspection every year. Why is this an issue? And essentially, if you are a human, if you were an expert and you farm out your thinking to, well, somebody else must be coming behind me to think about this or put their foot down.
Eric Johnson (23:30)
And say, well, this is the issue. Nobody's has said it's an issue before, so I'm not going to say it's an issue that is dangerous thinking. That is also the simply a bystander effect as well. if you don't know what the bystander effect is, is if there's an emergency, if there's somebody laying in the middle of the road, typically everybody that is seeing what is happening, if they see somebody's in in trouble, if they see somebody maybe somebody's beating up somebody else.
Eric Johnson (23:59)
They will go, Well, there's other people around and I don't have to be get involved because somebody else will step in and get involved. Well, what happens is everybody that is witnessing whatever event that is happening, they see that happening and all of a sudden now nobody helps the person that is laying in the road, maybe having a medical emergency, or maybe you know, somebody's beating up somebody else, and they just go, Well, I'm not getting involved, somebody else can get involved, and that's what we call the bystander effect.
Eric Johnson (24:28)
And people end up not doing what they know is right or know what they should do. And in the boil of the room, if you have an issue and you just go, well, it's it hasn't been an issue yet, so why would I be the one to bring this up or put my foot down or write this up or demand that this has to get done? I know it's wrong, but it hasn't been an issue, so it might not be an issue. Well, codes and rules and all that stuff is is as everybody says, they're all written in blood.
Eric Johnson (24:58)
And just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not gonna happen to you or happen in the future. If you know something is wrong, if you see something is wrong, you need to be able to put your foot down and say, Hey, this is incorrect. This is how we correct it, and you're the expert. You are the one getting paid to be the expert. If you're the operations person and you are running a boiler plant, if you're a chief engineer, you should be trying to run it in the most correct way and making sure that
Eric Johnson (25:27)
you and everybody around you are experienced and knowledgeable about the operation of the plant. And if you start getting lax, if you say, Hey, we can jump that out or we're supposed to do it this way, but actually we're gonna start doing it this way because it's cheaper or it takes less time or we're not gonna close and lock out those valves because that takes an extra 15 minutes. It's fine. We don't need to do that. Well let's just do this. You start
Eric Johnson (25:53)
Deviating away from safety procedures, you start deviating away from what you know is normal, and all of a sudden somebody gets hurt five years down the road, and people go, Wait, how did we get here? Well, the deviation started five years ago, and nobody has caught or nobody put their foot down because they just think it's normal. Because if you have a new person come into a facility and they see everybody else doing something and they're new, they are probably not going to say, Hey,
Eric Johnson (26:20)
This is wrong, they're probably not gonna speak up, and that's how new people on the job get hurt all the time because they trust that other people that have more experience than them are not going to lead them wrong. And they even know that they think that what they're doing is incorrect, everybody around them is saying that, hey, you should do this.
Eric Johnson (26:42)
So why would they be correct and everybody around them is incorrect? So they just assume it'll be fine in the moment, then they get hurt, then they get killed, and everybody goes, Well, how'd this happen? They throw their arms up. Same thing with writing an expert witness report and using chat GPT. It seems fine in the moment. who's gonna know? chat GPT knows everything, AI knows everything. Let me just plug all this stuff in and we'll write this report. Well, AI doesn't know everything, it's not actual intelligence.
Eric Johnson (27:11)
It is prediction based and if you don't have the proper guardrails around it, then you are relying on a prediction based algorithm and basically a magic black box in order to do your thinking. Don't underestimate the human experience and the power of the human brain. If we could just sub out all thinking to computers and artificial intelligence, we would.
Eric Johnson (27:41)
But AI has actually been around for a while. It's been around for decades. I was just reading you book. It came out in the early nineties and they were talking about AI in it for this boiler controls company.
Eric Johnson (27:55)
So don't think like this AI thing has been around for a couple years and we're just making all this progress. While the it has a use, while it has utility, there's a lot of money going around, and whenever money is involved, these companies aren't gonna speak out against this product. And if nobody is the wiser
Eric Johnson (28:21)
Everybody will go along with it till the music stops and all of a sudden people will be shocked and look back and say, how'd we get to this point? Don't let that happen to you in the boiler room. This person, this expert, in quotes, thought he could sub out thinking to Chat GPT and he was wrong. And the conclusion of this article, you know, during the deposition, they found out he used AI
Eric Johnson (28:48)
Later in the court trial
Eric Johnson (28:51)
The engineer admits using ChatGPT, but then repeatedly said that he's the expert in gas detection and that he has a body of work and twenty plus years of experience in the industry. And I would say, well, if you had twenty years of experience, why did you sub out all that experience to AI? And then he did not explain why he was using Chat GPT, but said my opinions were put in there and that AI helped me draft a straw man to build off of.
Eric Johnson (29:17)
And I put information opinions in up front before it ever generated. The output wasn't my opinion or what I agreed to. I did alter it. And then in the examination trial, the engineer agreed that 90 to 85% of the report was ChatGPT. And that he also prompted Chat GPT about the case several times while sitting in traffic to jog my memory about several different manufacturers of gas detectors.
Eric Johnson (29:46)
And I'm reading off a transcript here in the court case. We asked a question to the lawyer in a quote. Okay, well, you had to try to understand how to be an expert witness on gas detection systems by asking it what? And then the answer was again, I wanted to see what it had to say. And then the question was read the prompt, sir.
Eric Johnson (30:06)
And then the answer was as an expert witness in the gas detection loss and grinding, loss and grinding explosion. What am I basing my standard of care on as an expert witness? And that was question mark. And then they asked another question. Or the the questionnaire said this you wrote a 30 plus page written report. And then he answered, Yes, sir. That's 90 to 85% chat GPT. And then he answered, if you say so.
Eric Johnson (30:36)
And you signed it, and then he answered yes, sir. Send it to your boss and says, Man, I'm proud of this. And then he answered, Yes, sir. So this engineer outsourced 20 years of experience and thinking into being an expert witness. And maybe, you know, this was his first trial. Just because you have 20 years experience doesn't mean you know how to do everything, doesn't mean how you know how to be an expert witness for a court, or you know, maybe that's
Eric Johnson (31:03)
a failure of his boss and the people around him. Maybe he was set up and hey, you know, you're the expert here, just go do it. And maybe he had other things that he was dealing with and that maybe he didn't have time for this. Like I'm not saying that he's a hundred percent at fault here but he should have known better.
Eric Johnson (31:25)
And you can't always, you know, just blame everybody else. At the end of the day, he's responsible, his employer is responsible for doing this. And if you believe this is the important thing to remember, if you believe that s there's somebody else behind you coming behind you, if there is some other expert coming behind you to check on your work, that somebody else will stick up and say that this is wrong or
Eric Johnson (31:51)
If everybody else is doing it, then it must be correct. You are sorely mistaken. However, you can easily get into that thinking. If you get into the thinking once again of, hey, AI says it, so it must be correct. Well, they've had court cases that AI makes up and they bring evidence into court and they've already and this has already been an issue where lawyers are using court cases that are mythical and they use evidence that is mythical and they
Eric Johnson (32:20)
dive deeper into it, yet AI comes back as saying, well, these are true, and then they dive deeper into it and it's actually false. You have to have some training and have some guardrails about how you are going to operate AI as a tool, but don't outsource all your thinking to it. And it comes down the conclusion of all this comes down to what is the definition of an expert if the experts are outsourcing all of their thinking to AI.
Eric Johnson (32:49)
If AI was that great, 3M would have just said, Hey, write us a ninety page report on why are we not responsible for this. That's why they're paying an engineering firm ninety thousand dollars to do this. Why that's why they pay an expert. That's why somebody is hiring you, a company is hiring you to be the expert. That's why when you walk into the boiler room, you should be the expert. And that's why you are the one responsible and you are the one
Eric Johnson (33:16)
That needs to learn and not your employer, not the people around you. Yes, you can lean on them, but you are the expert whether you believe or not, and you have the responsibility to try to do your best to learn about boiler room codes, to learn about what is correct and incorrect, to write up things that are incorrect, even if they seem minor, to do things correctly. If you are once again doing a safety check on a boiler and you're like,
Eric Johnson (33:42)
I don't know if the low gas pressure switch is tripping or set correctly. Well, it's fine. The boiler's twenty-five years old. It doesn't look like the low gas pressure switch has been touched. And you know, how does the low gas pressure switch actually go wrong? You know, that's like a second tier safety. it's fine. Whatever. And then you just check it off on the report. I've seen pencil whipped CSD one checks the CSD one report or check, the annual check is
Eric Johnson (34:08)
required by the jurisdiction to be completed every year and they just chuck, chuck, check, chuck, check, and they're checking off safeties that don't actually exist on the boiler and don't actually work or the safeties are jumped out. I've seen low gas pressure switches installed where high gas pressure switches are. Or and the opposite way around. And it's like, well, if the switch is set to break on a pressure rise and it is installed in the low gas pressure situation
Eric Johnson (34:36)
How has it been checked and tested for years and years and years before this? And what it comes down to is people make the conclusion that, well, it must be fine. I don't know what's going on, but somebody else checked it. So it must be fine. And they just check it off. They get lazy. They don't look into it. That's why you should question everything. That's why you should go into a boiler room. And if you haven't personally witnessed and checked the safety yourself, it doesn't work until you prove it.
Eric Johnson (35:05)
And if you have that kind of thinking, you will go far and you will stay curious and you will find problems that
Eric Johnson (35:14)
may prevent an accident or something worse in in the future. If you go into a boiler room and you just say, I'm just here to do my job and you just put on the blinders, you change something, you do something real quick and you don't look around you, you can easily get into situations where you are missing the bigger picture, where you are basically shortchanging yourself from being the expert to, Wow, you know, it's just another Wednesday, here I am
Eric Johnson (35:44)
hate my job, hate this, my boss, this, and then your customer is paying for services that they're not actually getting. They're relying on you to be the expert in the boiler room, and you are relying on somebody else to be the expert in the boiler room. And that is very dangerous thinking. So I implore you to become your own expert, to learn, to constantly learn to not
Eric Johnson (36:11)
Sub out thinking to AI. Well, AI is a tool, and I use AI. This is not a hate AI, you know, AI is terrible thing. You have to recognize what AI is for. It is a tool. It is not your brain. And if you are blindly basing all your thinking and experience on AI, and you don't actually look into it and look into what it's generating, we are heading down a very
Eric Johnson (36:40)
dangerous path as humans, especially in the boiler industry, if that's where we go, is to blindly trust this computer generated intelligence, which actually once again isn't intelligence. So that's the story for today. That's my podcast. Something to think about is just because somebody has a title engineer doesn't make them the expert and you one you should
Eric Johnson (37:09)
question them if on how they got to a conclusion. And once again in this case they this engineer got to a conclusion via AI and didn't actually use his own thinking and writing.
Eric Johnson (37:23)
So if you are hiring a service company or you're hiring operation people, building engineers, and you are asking them, Hey, how'd you know this? How'd you do that? Hey, we're gonna replace this part, it's fifteen thousand dollars. Why are we doing this? If they can't actually tell you why, if they just say, well, you know, that's how it is, or well, the other thing's junk, then it's pro they probably don't know and you should probably get a second opinion. And that is why I
Eric Johnson (37:53)
Want you and everybody else around you to become the expert and to know your limitations. And that is when you ask other people for help and still rely on humans because humans are more powerful than we give ourselves credit. And you don't have to listen to all the marketing and all the nonsense about how robots and AI are going to outthink humans because right now
Eric Johnson (38:21)
Humans are basically trying to develop robots and AI and not the other way around. The human brain, we as humans barely understand it. So robots aren't aren't gonna just magically understand the human brain better than we do. So that's all I have for today. Boiler Wild. If you haven't already, rate the podcast five stars. If you enjoyed this episode or any other episode, let me know with a comment either on LinkedIn or
Eric Johnson (38:47)
You can email me eric dot johnson at boilearn.com That's B-O-I-L-E-A-R-N dot com. Thank you for listening and stay wild.
