Dave Has Been Squinting at Brake Assemblies Since 1994

There's a specific kind of joy in watching a band's original drummer walk back onstage after the fill-in couldn't land the pocket. The crowd knows. The bassist knows. The song, suddenly, knows. Whatever was slightly off (a shimmery wrongness nobody could name) snaps into alignment, and everyone exhales at once.I thought about that feeling all week, because Ford performed the corporate equivalent of calling the original drummer back to the kit.According to TechCrunch, Ford has hired roughly 350 veteran engineers over the past three years, many of them former employees, others brought over from suppliers, after determining artificial intelligence and automated systems couldn't hit the quality bar on their own. Assembly Magazine reports a similar number (some 300 experienced engineers and technical specialists) brought back specifically to work alongside the AI systems meant to replace them. Forbes framed the whole detour in blunter arithmetic: three years, billions of dollars, and a…