Liberating the Human Middleware: Pat Shanahan on Why AI Frees People Instead of Replacing Them

Pat Shanahan has deployed some of the most complex systems ever built. Thirty years at Boeing on the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, the F-35, the 777, and the 787. Then Deputy and Acting Secretary of Defense under Secretary Mattis, leading a department of more than 3 million people. Then the turnaround of Spirit AeroSystems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019, and he helped Brad and the team at Scale AI.

In this episode of Deployed, Brad Porter and Pat Shanahan get into what it actually takes to put hard new technology into the hands of the people doing the work. Pat tells the story of betting the company on designing the 777 entirely on a computer, and the moment on the factory floor when everyone was sure it would fail. They cover his rule of "only three miracles at once," why every deployment is a people problem before it's a technology problem, the difference between AI "safety" and product integrity, and why a man who has shipped at the largest scale there is wishes he could go back 20 years in his career with these tools.