The Problem With AI Answers Is That They’re Almost Right

Posted on March 28, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

AI slop isn’t obvious. That’s what makes it dangerous.

If an AI gave you complete nonsense, you’d catch it. The problem is when it gives you something fluent, confident, and “mostly” correct — with a flaw buried in the middle that you’ll only find if you already know the answer.

That’s the thing about AI as a research tool: it will give you the consensus view, coherently expressed, at the level of resolution that the training data supports. Where the training data is thin, ambiguous, or where real expertise requires distinguishing between things that *look* similar but aren’t — that’s where it fails. And it fails confidently.

Even when you use the deep research tools there are problems. When I was developing some content for my YouTube channel, The Unretired Engineer I ran into this doing research on Wolfspeed’s financial situation and the SiC power electronics market. I asked a deep research tool to pull together an analysis. What came back looked thorough. The problem was that it took a lot of information that had gone out about the future of the fab and future plans for markets and conflated them with what had happened and what was likely to happen in the near future.

To someone without a background with Wolfspeed and the real status of the SiC, the analysis would have read as authoritative. It wasn’t. It had serious timing errors delivered with confidence. I knew it was wrong because I’d spent years in that space. If I hadn’t, I might have taken it as written.

The fix isn’t to stop using it. The fix is to put yourself into it.

When I work with AI on my engineering writing, or on the physics underlying my novels, I’m not asking it to do the thinking. I’m using my domain knowledge to steer it, to catch the near-misses, and to push it past the consensus into territory where the expertise actually matters. The AI amplifies what I bring. Without that, it’s just averaging.

Use it as a tool. But know what it can’t know — and that’s usually the thing that matters most.

—

https://youtube.com/shorts/mbmKm_JcHQ0?feature=share

Mark Harris is a system and mechanical engineer and the author of “Stranded in the Stars” (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy), available now on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Stranded-Stars-M-Harris-ebook/dp/B0GT123PLP)

The Engineer’ Return to the Keyboard

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

Optimization, Systems, and Storytelling: Why I’m Back

It has been a while—twenty years by some counts—since I first sat down to bridge the gap between “This World” of high-tech engineering and the “Others” I build in my fiction.

For four decades, my world was defined by electronic packaging, power electronics, and project engineering for EVs in both the commercial and defense sectors. I’ve spent my time in the trenches of “Dilbert’s world,” working the real details that make everything from electromagnetic guns to nuclear electric space probes real. But as any engineer knows, a system is only as good as its last optimization.

During those 40-plus years, I was an intermittent author of fiction and science fiction, though at times the projects I worked on felt like fiction as well.

At 68, I was “unretired.” (You can see the genesis of this in my YouTube video, EVs Ate My Job.) Through my channel, The Unretired Engineer, I explore how a lifetime of technical rigor applies to the modern world. Now, I am bringing that same focus back to this blog and my novels. Writing is, after all, the ultimate engineering challenge: building a world from scratch that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own physics.

What to Expect Moving Forward:

Technical Deep Dives: The “how-to” behind the tech in my books, like the propulsion systems in The Sea of Suns.

The Editing Trench: Updates on my current copy-editing passes for The Sea of Suns and the structural work on Under Siege.

System Reflections: Thoughts on remote work, optimization theory, and the reality of a 40-year career.

World Reflections: Perspectives on technology, civilization, and war based on four decades of study.

The Workshop: Occasional updates on making with wood, resin, and whatever else I’m tinkering with.

I’m no longer just “tinkering.” I’m building. Whether you followed me here from YouTube or found my work on Smashwords, I’m glad you’re part of the system.

Let’s see what we can build next.

A little Short

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

I am pivoting as the Unretired Engineer and using AI in my creative work as an adjunct not a replacement. My view is that since AI’s neural core is built on a rather crystalized version of the scraped net it can’t be radically creative without ahuman’s idiosyncrasies. Which I think I provide in spades.

For 40 years I was an Engineer 15 of which was remote. It’s a tool not comfort food.

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Systems Engineering of Remote Work: A 40-year viewpoint
https://youtu.be/K6ntv7cWEn0

After 40 years in the industry—from the 13-acre “Industrial Beast” Naval Avionics Center in 1982 to project leadership of global power electronics projects, with long stints working from a home office—I’ve seen the data. In this video, I break down why the “Return to Office” debate is often a struggle against Sub-Optimization.

Explore why the physical office provides the “Grit” required for innovation and the “Density of Learning” necessary for junior engineers, while the home office offers the “Gold” of deep work and the objective distance needed for systems integration.

The Unretired Engineer

Posted on February 20, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

So I was busy for a long time and lost the thread on Blogging.

But now I am going through the metamorphosis into The Unretired Engineer (without glasses…ask me about cataract surgery and how it may not be for everyone.) Anyway….After a career in engineering and electronic systems packaging, at a number of companies. I was happily grinding away launching new Products at Wolfspeed, when the EV market collapse drove the company into receivership and me into unretirement.

You MUST participate in others Rebellion

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

in order for this psychodrama of rebellion to be successful, you and I must be enlisted into it. Truth requires the adherence of no one in order to be true, but the fragile lies of the left require everyone to be on board. Dissent provokes an unconscious reminder to their own denied truth, which is precisely why it “triggers” them.
Stuff I Learned Yesterday, OneCosmos

A truism that underlies much that might appear odd, as well as much Evil

Internal combustion battery…sort of

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

The center section is essentially 2 combustion chambers back to back, the orange wrap is the ‘stator’ of an electric generator. When the magnets tied to the piston runs through the stator it generates electricity. Then a spring returns the stator to the center and the cycle (2 cycle) starts again.
Green Car Report :Could Free Piston Range Extenders Broaden the Electric Truck Horizon?

One of the ‘cool’ things about a Free Piston Engine is that it can be packaged in a fairly simple block and because of the elimination of the mechanical drive train and residual mechanical controls (valves, cams, etc) the machine can eat different types of fuel and be tuned in a wide variety of ways quite simply. This makes it compatible with battery electric systems on a packaging and mission program ability standpoint.

A simple schematic of the bare bones of a free piston machine. Other uses have been proposed but tying it to a generator and modern power electronics to make it a range extender is pretty interesting. The technology is derivative of the highly refined IC engines of today and the equally long history of electric generators so this should be something that matures pretty quickly.

Time

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

Time is fundamental, it is much of what ‘being’ is about. It is central to reality. It is central to our lived experience, it is central to our hopes and dreams. But as central as it is, it is still an enigma.

Time is a knotty problem for physics, metaphysics, philosophy, religion, something fundamental to our existence and experience but for thousands of years and billions of person hours of contemplation and analysis it escapes understanding. Like others down the centuries I find that the more I think about it the harder to grasp it becomes.

Pragmatically there is only the local now, a few moments from the past and a glance into the future. Practically there is the Past and the Future, now is just a transition from one to the other.

What is time? It seems like it is about change, and times arrow is provided by entropy, the slow winding down of the universe.

Existence, the now, is only the Plank Time instant. What stitches the universe together are memory(enabled by change) and imagination (enabled by memory.)

One option of quantum physics says that it is the conscious mind that ‘collapses’ the probability function to one reality. In that view it is our mind-memory that provides a crashing rock against which universal potentiality breaks into reality. Is it us, stitching together the universe?

Why do we talk about timespace? Because time has no meaning without space and space no meaning without time. Imagine an infinite cube of arbitrary complexity. Without time nothing about it has any meaning. You cannot travel from one point to another, there is no energy, because no movement, nothing can move, because movement is about change of location and that has no meaning with no time. Equally, without space, time has no meaning, there is nothing to change, one could say something can endure or wind down but without space for that to occur it has no meaning.

So we ‘live’ in timespace that we instantiate and make objective. It is still real in that the physics of it are fixed (probably) but is it possible that it is our (or other consciousnesses) that take possibility and harden it to reality and inflate the universe around us, out to the limits of our questing minds?

Maybe….

Stealing the Lede

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

So 2 of our most obnoxious ‘organizationoids’ Black Lives Matter (the Org not the concept) and Antifa (Anti-fascist, which is technically anybody not International Socialist[communist-marxist]) essentially stole the lede as I think of that term, which is essentially something like ‘mind share tag.’

When you steal the lede, that mind share tag, you make it very difficult for others to use certain symbols, words, phrases, ideas, against you. For Black Lives Matter it made it very difficult for the majority to point out that they were destroying little B black, little L lives, by destroying their neighborhoods and local businesses. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it made pointing out that Antifa is exactly fascistic in its heart and operations, impossible to make stick.

In both of those cases i think the evidence clearly shows that if you seal off some of our ability to communicate things clearly it in fact makes it very difficult to combat actions and ideas until the damage is obvious enough not to be obfuscated by ‘mere’ words.

Grumpy elders…

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

Not much more to say there. Other than everything I hear about what Elizabeth II has indicated publicly, is what I would expect from the grandest of ladies, polite and deflecting rather than the hard right to the chops the little bitches both deserve.

My personal weekend grumpy gripe is the shit show from the idioechelon’s of the DoD about mean things that Tucker Carlson says.

The operational uniformed men and women in the services and the working level folks in the DoD are 99.999% good folks. But unfortunately in this day and age the fraction that works its way to the top is the dregs not the cream.

Do Not Trust DoD! DoD is Asshole!

And

I worked in one of the Navy Industrially Funded Facilities for 15+ years before the assholes in industry finally paid congress enough to get them to shut down those generators of expertise and providers of reasonable cost special projects. I got a PhD level training in technology and the management of technology working on electronics and packaging at NAC, the Naval Avionics Facility, of fond memory.

Do not trust Congress! Congress is Asshole!