Comment by j16sdiz
17 days ago
You missed the point. Computers can make decisions, but we shouldn't let them.
This is because they can't take the blame, they can't be held responsible.
17 days ago
You missed the point. Computers can make decisions, but we shouldn't let them.
This is because they can't take the blame, they can't be held responsible.
The original article feeds precisely this misreading. It quotes the old IBM adage ‘a computer MUST never make management decisions’ (my emphasis) but describes it in its headline as ‘a computer CAN not make decisions’ (my emphasis)
These are not the same, and this misinterpretation of the author’s intent inevitably follows.
CAN NOT is horribly ambiguous in English which is why RFCs use MUST and MAY.
In casual speech someone might say “you can’t park there” but that’s not true. They might mean “you must not park there” or “you should not park there” but the only reason they are telling you is because you CAN park there.
> CAN NOT is horribly ambiguous in English which is why RFCs use MUST and MAY.
Is it ?
I thought 'can' denotes a possibility, while 'not' negatates it ?
It gets used more often to express prohibition not impossibility (“you can’t be in here” spoken to someone who manifestly is for example). Also disbelief (“this can’t be happening” about something that is happening). It’s just not clear which sense people mean it in, so it can’t be used when you want to be sure you can’t be misunderstood.
For another example of ambiguity, consider the sentence “A triangle can not have any obtuse angles”.
Is this 1) true, because there exist triangles with only acute angles, or 2) false, because triangles can have obtuse angles?
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More to the point, a simple control flow statement is really a decision made by the person who programmed the computer, not made by the computer.
Though LLMs make this all fuzzy it's still basically the same thing. LLMs didn't decide to make a toxic culture of LLM use, people did. They were told that it was necessary to save themselves.
Computers are operated to (either through command or through training) make decisions. Liability for the consequences of the decisions obviously lies on the operator of the computer that made the decisions. Or at least that should be obvious.