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by yubblegum 43 days ago
> Humans aren’t any better

We're different.

People have fairly consistent faults. LLMs are nondeterministic even in terms of how they fail. A high value human resource can be counted on to deliver. That, imho, is in fact one of the primary roles of good management: putting the right person in the appropriate position.

Process engineering has worked to date because both the human and mechanical components of a system fail in predictable ways and we can try to remedy that. This is the golden bug of the current crop of "AI".
1 comments
lowbloodsugar 43 days ago
> A high value human resource can be counted on to deliver.

Anyone who has encountered politics, psychopaths and narcissists knows that this isn’t always true.

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Joker_vD 43 days ago
Normally, people don't suddenly go insane, snap and start deliberately deleting things in production. Sure, it happens, but very, very rarely.
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lowbloodsugar 43 days ago
People make bad decisions all the time. Insanity is not required. My remark was pointing out the larger failure mode of people acting contrary to the good of the team for personal gain, eg creating a problem and blaming someone else to reduce their chances of competing for a promotion. But to your point, an SDE doesn’t need to be insane to bypass a 2 PR and force a change into production. They just need to be panicked, or overconfident, or overworked.
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Joker_vD 43 days ago
> They just need to be panicked, or overconfident, or overworked.

One of the best thing about digital computers, compared to humans, was that they can't be the first or the third thing you mentioned; unfortunately, they absolutely are the second ("the machine does exactly what you told it to do, not what you want it to do"), and at inhuman speeds. Presumably, AI would (need, actually — Nick Bostrom puts a fairly reasonable argument for that in his "Superintelligence") fix that second bullet point, and then everything will be peachy.

Instead, we have people on the internet arguing that it's not a problem, since people too have this same problem. Which is a problem. But not a problem. Ugh.

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lowbloodsugar 43 days ago
Computers absolutely can be overworked. Plenty of outages caused by system overloads. Or a system deletes a file because it believes it to be no longer in use but only because some queue was full. I’m not arguing that it’s not a problem because humans have the same problem. Part of my job is making sure humans can’t fuck it up either. I’m saying “assume the worst” and make sure the processes catch human and AI mistakes.

Also, I think Nick makes the same point as me: AI will attempt to kill us.

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