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by sxg 3 hours ago
In certain circumstances, the answer is yes. If an airplane's pilots are incapacitated, do you simply give up and crash the plane because there are no other pilots on board? Or would you rather have someone on the ground try to coach a passenger into at least attempting to land the plane?
4 comments

That's an extreme edge case, which I don't think is in the context of the concerns in this thread.
The specific case doesn't matter--it's meant to make you think about the general question throughout this thread: when an expert isn't available, should non-experts use AI (or other tools) to help themselves? Sometimes the answer is yes because the potential benefits outweigh the potential harms (if any harms exist). But sometimes the answer is no because misleading/incorrect advice can cause a net harm.
But if the cases where AI use is a net positive are one in a million in medical situations? The argument is surely about the ratio, which many people here are arguing (from anecdote, would be interested to see a real study) is not in its favour, and the potential downsides - from both false positives and negatives - can be huge.
As long as that passenger didn’t have the fish.
A passenger crashing the plane while trying to avoid a certain crash doesn’t make things any worse. An incompetent doctor trying to save you from certain death can make things so much worse. It’s all about weighing the best/worst outcome compared to where you are now.
I hate to break it to you but death is certain for everyone.

Properly emotionally processing this fact and your complete inability to do anything about it is called an "existential crisis" and if you haven't had one or several yet, you will.

I’m not sure what the “revelation” is? How is this related to what I said?

Putting that aside, your philosophy sounds shallow. Death is certain, but how long you have to live and the quality of that life are not predefined. An incompetent passenger-pilot trying to save you from a crash will at worst make no difference. But an incompetent doctor can teach you that death isn’t necessarily the worst outcome.

You can choose a) a calm, level-headed passenger who knows they aren't a pilot, or b) a calm, level-headed passenger who almost has their pilots license but has a medical condition that prevents them from admitting when they lack certain knowledge.

Who do you choose to be coached by an expert on the ground?

No thank you, I will ask Claude and then ask ChatGPT to challenge me, and do a couple of rounds like that.

The first: Has no clue about anything and therefore no useful knowledge and cannot challenge me

The second one: Is proven to willfully give wrong information and will make me do mistakes for sure.

The LLMs will do their best, even if imperfect, since they summarizes what appeared in books.

I prefer to be grounded on what Airbus / Boeing manuals, or on what pilots training book said, than two far more unreliable sources.