| > I don't think 100.0% accuracy is a reasonable requirement for anything. It is for some things: it's a matter of serenity of the mind, of trust even. I don't want my water pipe to leak (yes, physically, it's never closed at 0%, but as far as I am concerned, as far as my water bill is concerned, when the faucet is closed, it's 100% closed - or, it's up for repair). I don't want my pencil to draw 2% away from where my hand goes: I want it to be the exact result of what I do, imperfections included, because that's what matters to me: what's my own making (that's why I really despise drawing/painting tools that _automatically_ smooth lines and brushes: I need this to be an option). Nobody will consider a "sorry I'm late, my phone AI gave me almost the good address for the appointment" as anything else than a loose excuse. And nobody will trust their phone AI ever after a failed interview. I may tolerate a text generator to screw up things or meddle with my input, but only because/if/when I use it in that perspective: as kind of a dice/spaghetti thrower, as a toy, not as something I would depend on. > it feels a mistake to rule it out as "useless" when a huge number of people are already making use of it. Popularity is unrelated as to how each person will appreciate those tools for themselves. 1/ if you can tolerate the failure margin of the tools you use (and the consequences that come with it), of course it may be of use to you. 2/ if you feel you cannot _trust_ the machine that listen to you, stores your data, and drives some of your life, it is more than useless, it's literally cruft, it's a burden, given all the care and worry (and the cost) that goes around it. |
If you have a pencil that, due to the graphite core being loose, draws 0.5mm from your intended position and you're considering swapping to another pencil, then I'd say the correct line of consideration for the new pencil is whether it's more accurate than the alternatives (and weigh that up against other factors like cost/comfort). If you reject it for not having absolutely zero imprecision, you may just be inadvertently be sticking with an option that has greater imprecision.
Totally fine to decide not to use some tool if it really is less accurate than the alternatives (and you don't consider that inaccuracy to be made up for by other factors) - and I agree plenty of uses-cases would fall into that - just that it should be compared in this way and not against some "it must never make errors" standard. I see the same logic applied to autonomous vehicles ("they should be penalized/not allowed on roads until they cause zero deaths"), computer-vision quality-assurance ("the system is unacceptable if it misses any defects"), or even vaccines ("the manufacturer must be sued into the ground for every side-effect").
> Nobody will consider a "sorry I'm late, my phone AI gave me almost the good address for the appointment" as anything else than a loose excuse.
In 2025 if I give someone an address, I pretty much expect them to use some system with ML-based query-understanding/routing/map-updating/etc. like Google Maps, and would find it more odd if their excuse was that they were having trouble with their paper maps.