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Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools
Is AI Causing Us to Lose Critical Knowledge? with Keith Schafer
00:29:11
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Foreign.
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Causing us to lose critical knowledge. We're going to find out with today's amazing special guest, Keith Schaer. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast where we make AI simple, practical and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated tech talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. These the Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by Fraction aio, the trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation. At Fraction aio, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most, driving growth and results. We guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to AI, ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let Fraction AI help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more and get started. Fractionaio.com Now Keith, I'm so excited to have you here because you're part of multi generations of something that's really critical to infrastructure and especially in America. And I know your grandfather started in the gas industry over a hundred years ago and your father was in the industry and you've been doing it a long time now your son is in the industry. If all this generations of natural gas, what do you think has made your family stick with this? Because I know there's one thing I know it's my kids want to do something but it's whatever, anything other than what I do. So how do you kind of have that consistency in your family that's amazing to me?
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Well like I said, I grew up with on the pipeline with my dad, me and my brother we'd always be with dad when he could take us out on the right of way where they laying pipe across the hills and I always thought that was interesting and love to see be out there in the outside working and enjoying the environment and seeing that done and knowing that the natural gas business has always been a steady business. If you're good at what you do, you're always going to have a job. My grandpa started when he got home from World War I and my dad after World War II and they spent their whole careers in the business and I was lucky enough to been 50 years in the business now with the company and through contract work now that I'm doing now. So I retired four years ago and Doing a little contract work, training, consulting, just on my spare time. Last four years. Still enjoy it
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now. When you started out, all the calculations were done on paper, with paper and pencil. And I think that we have started to move away from trusting our ability to do math in our heads. And then it was calculators and now it's having an AI do the math for you. And we're kind of shifting away. And this is kind of how I feel like I know how to read a map. Whereas, like people five years younger than me have never even seen a map because they've grown up with gps. And first time I used gps, it told me to drive off. It literally told me to drive off the side of a bridge. And I was like, I don't think I'm going to trust you. So I have like this paranoia about it. But we move to newer and newer tools and we kind of forget that foundational thing. And how are you able to have like trust in your calculations or why? What do you think is happening where people are shifting away from like trusting their own ability to do math in their heads? Like even now at a lot of places you can't even make your own change. Like it figures out the change for you.
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Yeah, I feel lucky to get started in this business when we still had that. A lot of the new guys coming on now, they've never seen that. My 50 years has been in compressor reliability work and we use a lot of test equipment and, and things that I was teaching a class last week and we just talking about before I used to use the analog oscilloscopes and the, the guys that I'm training never, never even heard of an analog oscilloscope. Let's use one. And now everything from the 90s, late 90s up is all digital equipment. And there's some great advantages to it and there's some disadvantages to it. So there's you. You give up some things to, to make it easier and faster and easier to use when you go to some of the new technologies, but after you do without it for so long, you don't know that you missed it. And I can still talk about some things that we used to be able to do with analog that digital is just now catching up to. And like I said, everything was. We walked around our engines and equipment recording data with the log sheet every hour on the hour for long time. And then now all that is automated and pulled into the computers and, and our SCADA screens and we can see it anywhere in the world that our Pressures and temperatures and things that we want to collect on an engine or a piece of equipment anywhere in the world from your cell phone now and makes it convenient and easy. But we lose a lot of on hand experience when we do that sometimes.
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Yeah, I see my kids, I have five young kids and the way they deal with technology are so different to me. Like I'm used to if a tape or video won't play, you pull it out and blow on it like or you slap the side of a tv. And that's actually made things work before and we don't have kind of this tactile experience. So we're starting to see this knowledge gap where everyone from my generation was like college is the solution. And now the average plumber in America is over 60 years old. So there's this huge gap. When they all retire, all the, it's going to be like the, it's going to be the seller's market for plumbers. Right. Because it's like there's only one in town. You can charge wherever you want. And we're seeing a lot of these types of things happen with these jobs. And I think that a lot of people the past 20 years thought that we were going to be all switched to windmills and solar panels by now. But now with this massive spike in need for energy from AI data centers, like every single day there's an announcement of a new data center and they use like insane amounts of power, like more than an entire city and sometimes more than a state. Are you already starting to see the need for energy spiking in the projects you're working on and in all of the different natural gas needs and traditional oil needs that are coming? Because we're starting to see, we're building data centers everywhere and especially they want to build the remote locations closer to the power center. So with this gap, is there going to be an even bigger need for your industry going forward?
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Yeah, the natural gas business is being instrumental in the data centers because they're starting to put the data centers where we have the natural gas now that a previous company, DC Energy, I just saw last week or last week that they are already have approved 1.5 or $2.5 billion for a new pipeline just to supply data centers. So we're, we the transmission pipeline system and the transmission electrical grid across the US has got to be upgraded because it, it, we don't have all the energy where they want it. And that's how you, it takes a lot of infrastructure to get it there. We can put In a where we can get the gas in the shale regions in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Texas. But we still got to get that to the sources. And that's laying a lot of pipelines and putting in a lot of compressor stations. That is a big demand for that.
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That's something I really wanted to dive into which is that a lot of people think you push a button, the power turns on. But what does the AI industry really not understand about what it actually takes to get the gas from a well headed Pennsylvania to a data center in Virginia? Like how long does it take to build the pipeline, how much maintenance does it need and how complex is that process?
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What's made it so complex a lot is the new regulations involves with the environmental issues that we have all the time. So that's one of the biggest drawbacks of and, and just getting right of ways to build these power lines or natural gas stations so or pipelines. So the a lot of it is environmental regulations that hoops we got to jump through. If you remember the Keystone pipeline just a few years ago we had that and it would have been pumping a lot of oil that we need right now if it wasn't canceled. So that was canceled. Just political and environmental issues that they thought they would have and if they would have built it, it would have really come in handy in our oil prices right now. Our gasoline prices. Yeah, so what?
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One of the things I've noticed is that for a long time I think we haven't built a nuclear power plant in America since the late 70s or early 80s. We just didn't make it ban it. But there's been a moratorium because of the Three Island, Three Mile island incident. Suddenly now everyone seems to be okay with nuclear because like oh if we're going to make enough power for nuclear power plants, we need nuclear. Suddenly oh, if it gives me AI then I'm okay with nuclear. So like I've never seen such a fast shift in how people felt about something with environmental. Are you noticing the same kind of shift about natural gas or oil that suddenly people are like well we really need especially right now with prices skyrocketing for other fuel sources, are people starting to become more relaxed or like shifting their environmental views?
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The people I always known natural gas and oil is the way to go. Nuclear power, I've always been a fan of that if it's done right. And now the micro stations, small nuclear facilities, I think that's got a lot of potential for leading into the AI centers that's coming up. Yeah, there's there's what going on with the natural gas in our like say you. The environmental side of it is, has always been against the natural gas and oil business. But when they started looking at the biggest reduction that we've had in the US on on CO is because of natural gas taking the place of the coal planting go coal burning fire power stations that, that they've displaced. So natural gas has replaced a lot of coal plants over the last 15 to 20 years and that's dropped the CO in the US by numbers they never even imagined a few years ago. And we're still producing more because we're using natural gas instead. Natural gas is, is a clean burning fuel but it just gets a bad name because they say it's a fossil fuel and it gets in that category of oil and coal.
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It seems like there's a lot of misunderstanding about how natural gas works because either you have a natural gas stove and so you're used to having a pipe to your house, which I had when I lived in Tennessee, or you imagine that it gets burned right where you drill it and then turn electricity and sent through the wires. So people are, I think there's a pretty lack of understanding. And also everyone tends to be like 10 or 20 years behind. Like everyone's really just now talking about fracking, which I know has been around for a long time and you kind of mentioned and I've heard that like it's now about horizontal drilling. Like you turn down and then take a right turn to get to the natural gas or to what's down there. How is the industry changing and why do you think there is this kind of delay between what we're doing now and what people hear about which is from 20 or 30 years ago.
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Yeah, the, the 20 years ago when, when they discovered the shell well, really discovered the shale plays in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia have been there for millions of years. But the trouble is drilling a mile to two miles deep and putting a straight hole in the ground wasn't very economical with the, the invention of that horizontal drilling. Now they can drill a mile deep and go out in that right hand direction for a mile, then take another hole, straight down in that same hole and go another direction. So they can fan out a lot of different directions. And now they have access to a lot more natural gas that that would have taken thousands of holes in the ground, but now they can do it with just one hole. And that was the technology that really got the boom going. The, the fracking is the term that everybody that wanted to be against our business said was destroying the environment and having poison chemicals down the wells. And that was what they wrote on. But the whole technology was the horizontal drilling that really got the shale play. Moving the fracking is something they've been doing 100 years in the oil and gas business and you never even heard of it until it started doing a natural gas business with the Shell place. So it's a lot of hype on, on all of that, but the drilling now, the technology, with that we can get a lot more gas out of the ground and then we build the infrastructure. When, when I was heavy working with TC Energy, we was building pipelines and moving it from West Virginia. We brought gas out of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico for 65 years and brought it up to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio for gas distribution. Now with the shale plays, we, we are now sending 3 billion cubic feet of gas a day down that pipeline going to the LNG facilities in Louisiana and Texas. That's, that's just one pipeline that the whole shift of where we get gas from and where we send in a tube is, is changed dramatically over the years.
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How has technology changed over your kind of journey? I've been approached by for some projects where they want to, and I know we have scada, which is amazing, where one person, a centralized place, can watch all the different data so from a bunch of centers. Right? So they're watching all their wells from one location. But now they're talking about replacing that person with an AI, which always makes me nervous when I get approached by projects that are safety because AI is as cool as it is. It's not truly artificial intelligence and it can never. It doesn't know how to adapt to surprises. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that no matter what happens, it's all. There's a surprise somewhere. And like, that's kind of one of the areas that worries about me. And we're constantly thinking, let's replace everyone with AI. Let's replace everyone with AI. How are you kind of seeing these shifts in your industry? And where are the good places where it's okay and where are the places where you're a little bit hesitant?
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Like, I am a little bit hesitant because I'm. I'm thinking the hype with the AI data centers is, is going to probably be overkill because we are building massive data centers and say we need all this power right here and we are trying to supply for them. And I think after a few years, the power supply is going to be a lot lower than what they think. And we're going to have all this infrastructure moving electricity and gas to these data centers. That's not going to be required anymore. So I think there'll be a lot. I think we're overkill on a lot of it right now that with the technology coming on, you know what they say we need all this power for the data centers. Do you know why they need all the power? A lot of it is just for cooling fans to cool from the heat that it generates. When you, if somebody comes up to technology to get some other cooling besides like what they're doing, putting a lot of these data centers in water and under the sea and stuff to not have to supply all the cooling capacity for that. So there's, there's things that I think right now is going to be way overbuilt on the power side and that's going to cost some money for a lot of people coming up. And then my fear is building the data center and them coming right off of the grid and using so much on, on the grid that, that people won't be able to cool the homes in the wintertime or summertime. Then we have blackouts and brownouts because the data center is taking all the power.
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Yeah, I think that's when people will turn against AI. When it's air conditioning or AI, suddenly AI is not as cool anymore very quickly. And the thing about these data centers I think about a lot is they, they make two big assumptions, which is that everyone needs more and more AI and that AI will not become more efficient. So like the models are not getting bigger, they're getting smaller. What everyone really wants is an AI in their watch that they don't have to be online. That just works. And that means it needs no data center. And I already have seen there was a big, like technology recently came up from Google that massively decreased almost by 70% how much RAM and AI needs and we're going to see more and more of that. We always see that right where we have a big technology, then we find an efficiency, that we have a new technology, we find an efficiency. And all these data centers, the problem is the chips already are only valuable for 18 months. And then it's like, oh, you're using last year's chips. Gross. Like, it's such a fast turnover that I think you're exactly dialed into something that we're assuming that the chips in two years will use the same cooling, will need the same power, we'll need the same size and it's why we're constantly building new and new data centers. And it's just, it reminds me of the hype cycle a few years ago about, you know, everyone said they're going to wear virtual reality goggles and they built all this stuff and turns out no one wants it. Right. The technology shifted. Like there's no way I, I have five kids. There's no way I'm putting on goggles and turning my back on them. Like that's crazy. Like that's why let alone we all, we're all wearing goggles to watch a movie. So we're all together but all alone. And so sometimes I do think that we get excited by this idea. And data centers, it's a great business to be in right now because everyone will give you tons and tons of money. But they all, you know, 18 months later, like everything we spent millions of dollars on is worthless. What do we do? And it's a constant cycle. So I think that's something that's really important is to look at more strategic and more long term. And there are some, what we're going to see is like this big spike in energy demand and then a big dip. Right. We're going to have all this leftover energy. Oh, actually we don't need these data centers because now it can live in your phone. Like two years ago you could not put any AI in your phone and now you put a pretty good one in there and it's going to get better and better to where? Oh, we don't need these things. And so these assumptions we've made are kind of going in the wrong direction. But I'm also interested in.
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Yeah, I was going to say the very thing right there. To build a major pipeline or transmission line to a data center and supply gas, they have to guarantee that we're going to get paid. So they'll sign 20 and 30 year contracts to take this much power from us. And when they do come that and they don't need it, some of these are going to go bankrupt trying to just cover their contracts. So there's going to be some things start up that will not be able to sustain theirself.
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Yeah, I think that's exactly what happens. Right. You get too excited and they're so busy thinking about the upside, they don't think about the downside. One thing that really interests me, I know you had this amazing experience as an expert witness in a case in New X. So I'd love to hear about that because lawsuits drag on for years and Years. But you were able to settle that thing pretty quickly. Can you talk a little bit about that story?
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No, I'm sorry, I didn't hear the first part
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about your. You have an experience being an expert witness. I'd love to hear that story.
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Just with my experience around equipment and engines, compressors. I had a group of lawyers contact me about wanting to be an expert witness on a fire that they had. And I thought, well, they got the wrong number. And they. He said no, he wanted to talk to me about it. And I said what? Found out a little bit about what they had. Had a compressor out Midwest that caught fire and burned up in the middle of the night and caused a lawsuit between the pipeline company, the packager that supplied the equipment, and then the contractor that worked on the equipment they had. The fire happened. So each one was blaming each other for the fire. And when I went to the site and looked at a unit that had been burned, completely burned up for two years out in the field, I could tell pretty quickly just about what happened and how it started. And once I told the lawyers what my opinion was, they took it to the other group of lawyers and said, you don't have a case now. That this is what happened because of lack of maintenance, basically that the companies kind of dealt with each other with a handshake because I said, what's the scope of work that you had? They said, we didn't have the scope of work, we just agreed to fix it. And I said okay. So they. Nobody knew what the other group was doing. And when they said, okay, we fixed your engine, we're done, they paid them and they left. And 30 days later it caught fire. So I could tell that the handoff was probably the biggest problem because they didn't follow up on work that supposed to have been done by the oem, the original equipment manufacturer. They recommend after you do these repairs that certain things have to be rechecked and torqued and tightened up. And nobody did that because the contractor said that when we finished, we left. We didn't pay us to do any follow up work. And the company that owned it, they didn't do anything for self either. So the lack of following up with the equipment manufacturer to see what maintenance need to be done, they didn't do and that's what failed and it caused a fire. I, after I went and investigated it, talked to the lawyers that hired me, told them everything. It was about two months later they called me, said they settled down to court, we don't have to deal with all that now. So I, it didn't have words as fun and interesting. I don't know if I'd want to do all that work all the time. But it is another interesting job that I had in last year that was pretty, pretty good. Unique situation for me.
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Yeah, that's really exciting. I've always wanted to be an expert witness.
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So yeah, I didn't get to go back to the trial, but with what we did, they can settle out a court deal.
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Just one last question as we wind down. This has been so exciting. Just curious. When a gas company decides to adopt a new piece of technology, whether it's predictive analytics, AI monitoring or a new tool, what does that adoption process look like inside the industry? Because from the outside people perceive energy as very slow to change. As a slow moving industry, kind of like healthcare, education.
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Well, the industry, we work with different companies across the whole footprint, all over the world really. And we see what our reliability is. So we know we have to deliver gas from point A to point B. And we have compressor stations that move that gas all across the country. And if we're not efficient, company or another gas company will get that price to move that gas cheaper. So we, we have to keep our equipment as, as efficient and, and maintenance free as we can. So the technology that we develop, the other gas companies develop and we have contractors that, that work with us that, that we deal with as far as equipment manufacturers that, that build this equipment based on what we tell them we want. And then we, we have to hire people or contract people out to do the test work that we want to be, say that we're safe and reliable to, to do this and a lot last thing we want is other failures, other pipelines and anybody getting hurt in our industry. It is a very dangerous business. But if you do things right, you can move it safely all over the world. And it takes everybody doing it right. And you don't want to give up something that's quick and easy for safety. So we spend a lot of time making sure that our equipment is running properly. Not only to be efficient so we can move it as cheap as we can, but we got to do it safely as we can. So we got to keep those things in focus there, safety being number one. And then everything else works down on how we, how we move our technology and distribute across our each of our companies to get, get all of our equipment running when we want it to. And we have to have it reliable because when it's 20 below zero outside these engines have to run or a lot of people get cold.
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Yeah. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all this information. I know that our audience is really going to love this, so thank you so much for being here today. Keith, for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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Good Jonathan
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thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business's revenue, head over to to artificialintelligencepod.com Calculator Use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy and might just change the way. Think about your business while you're there. Catch up on past episodes, leave a review and check out our socials.