Comment by soco
12 hours ago
You have a very engineer-like approach, like if you draw the line from A to B everything will work fine. Real world is different though. Humans will blissfully ignore the orders, business analysis is a lost cause since decades, and AI is built on human knowledge so guess what it will keep doing. Now what? How do we build systems without assuming complete adherence, but tolerating imperfection and failures? Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?
> Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?
That’d be engineering.
Yes and there is a reason, we are in theory, held to such higher standards. I used to think it was harder to draw the line with AI. The simple reason being when I as an engineer say something is not feasible (not not possible, just wrong and not worth doing), I could be overridden with AI. Now that we have more complex models == more money, I can draw the line with dollars and that is a language way stronger than technical feasibility to management.
I indeed have a engineer-like approach, but engineering absolutely does not assume draw line from A to B and expect that's enough:
Real world, as you say, not so simple. Everything has to deal with certain degree of forecastable nonsense, e.g. a bridge has to cope not only with traffic and winds, but the possibility that someone will be drunk in charge of a ship and crash into it.
> AI is built on human knowledge so guess what it will keep doing.
Yes, and also brings its own additional mess on top of that. All machine learning takes a huge number of examples to get good, so an LLM isn't just "read all the online courses in how to run a business", but also likely has 50 business versions of the recent demonstration of common sense failure with "I live 100m from a car wash, should I walk or drive?"
> How do we build systems without assuming complete adherence, but tolerating imperfection and failures? Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?
Many such disciplines. Perhaps all except maths and computer science? Or even including maths and computer science, given stats is part of maths and even compsci has to deal with fault tolerance.