Ai to spot potholes; as if the problem with potholes is we don’t know where they are and not that years of government cutbacks mean we can’t afford to fix them.
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There's a couple of issues here and it might be useful to have a specialist weighing in (not me, I just worked in the back office) but typically to fix a pothole you need a couple of visits.
You need someone like a quantity surveyor to take a look to see if its a big pothole, small pothole or just a dark bit of the road, or it might even be a sink hole. Someone needs to verify it before the send out the chaps to actually fix it.
It might just be a small job that can be done in ten minutes with a tub of Ultra-Crete. Or it might be a two hour job with pneumatic drills and roller.
It might even be some kind of underground problem where there's a dip in the road surface, which needs a different fix.
There's also the issue of traffic management. If its a main road you'll need cones and stuff. If its a wee side street and a ten minute job then you won't. If its a high speed road or motorway then you might need a road closure.
My back office job was literally logging locations of potholes on a gis system, so the guys who do the work could go out and fix them.
The proposed AI could eliminate my role, so a greater proportion of the budget goes to the guys who do the work, and a smaller proportion to admin chumps.
Instead of spending money on fixing the potholes, let’s spend it on a massively inefficient and destructive new way of telling us there’s a pothole that needs fixed.
Instead of spending money on the back office guy who logs the location of the pothole, or the day scout guys who goes out and takes photos of the location and measures its size, the money could be spent on the guys who fix the pothole.
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Its not as simple as "fix that pothole!"
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It might even be some kind of underground problem where there's a dip in the road surface, which needs a different fix.
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The AI can just process a photograph and figure out the size and depth or the pothole and otherwise categorise it quicker than a human can.
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The proposed AI could eliminate my role, so a greater proportion of the budget goes to the guys who do the work, and a smaller proportion to admin chumps.
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