Comment by ozim
5 days ago
Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters.
We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much.
E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be delivered.
10% is still quite a lot!
Reliability matters in lots of areas that aren't war. Ignoring obvious ones like medicine/healthcare and driving, I want my banking app to be reliable. If they charge me $100 instead of $1 because their LLM didn't realize their currency was stored in floating point dollars and not cents, then I may not die but I'd be pretty upset!
I was writing about Therac 25 that’s not war that’s medical equipment and code written by a human that killed people. Without LLM.
We guarantee 5 nines of uptime, and 1 nine of not killing people
<< 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people.
As we give more and more autonomy to agents, that % may change. Just yesterday I was looking at hexapods and the first thing it tells you ( with a disclaimer its for competitions only ) that it has a lot of space for weapon install. I had to briefly look at the website to make sure I did not accidentally click on some satirical link.
Main point is that there is many more lines of code of CRUD business apps running on AWS and instances of applications than even non-autonomous car software even though we do have lots of cars.
Most code will not kill people, but a lot of code could kill a business.