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by maplethorpe 54 days ago
I think the unfortunate fact is that most jobs in the world do not require accuracy, so an inaccurate result has a negligible impact over an accurate one.

I used to feel job safety in the knowledge that AI labs weren't likely to solve the hallucination problem. Then it dawned on me that they don't need to — they just need to reduce our collective expectations.

2 comments

I predict that this illusion of "(in)accurate enough" will last long enough to trigger a cascading avalanche of failures across all fields of human endeavours, an I'd be pretty cautious to bet on quick recovery or even survival of this civilization after that.
Isn't that entirely analogous to our evolved and lived experiences?

We've never had to act with surgical precision except in matters of math/science/engineering.

Like how you fill up your coffee cup up to a level probably +/- 50ml each morning.

No. For most of human evolution, we were hunter-gatherers. Imagine trying to hunt game with the accuracy of LLMs. You'll starve. Picking edible fruits from plants also requires precision, both in terms of the hand/eye coordination of actually picking it as well as in terms of knowing what's edible and what's poisonous.

When you fill up your coffee cup in the morning, I sure hope you aim accurately and don't pour half of it all over your desk. And don't even get me started on the process of making coffee that isn't completely unpalatable.