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We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

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Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#71

Post by dv_dt »

samsquire wrote: post #8

Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers! I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. Logging into systems, Moving data around in memory and between servers, into registers for a function call, to and from a REST API, installing packages, finding dependencies, chaining together library functions.

Getting up to the point of doing the thing usually takes more time than the thing itself. that’s true in a lot of endeavors. Are you in a physical factory assembling product? The production and assembly time end to end is often a fraction of the time and effort spent putting everything in place to run the assembly.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#74

Post by 1propionyl »

mdavidn wrote: post #46
oceanplexian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real “safety” problem with AI. Since it’s so good at generating convincingly wrong answers, eventually we are going to build it into all sorts of mission critical systems and and everything from finance to healthcare will start to accumulate sophisticated, non deterministic failures over time. Like a trojan horse or a perhaps a civilization-level virus.

It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

No, it is dissimilar.

Humans learn over time.

Humans have social pressures.

Humans have explanatory rather than merely predictive models about what they do.

Deviations by humans from expected standard behavior often produce better rather than worse results.

The list goes on.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#75

Post by 6510 »

eastbound wrote: post #57
wredue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude on HN was describing the other day how they’re moving to use an AI to generate a list of cars with specific features in their inventory and how this was a great part of the AI future. But as we see frequently even on the most sophisticated AIs, they get shit wrong… a lot. So this company decided to replace an actually working, guaranteed to produce proper results filtering system with a guaranteed to not produce…

My accountant forced AI into software. It literally removes the labels I put and puts bullshit labels instead. I’m part of their largest customers and I have only 300 invoices a year. I’m still stunned how people can mess up like this.

I'm quite surprised how we still don't have fixed quality data formats that anyone can easily transform into every possible thing. Accountants should be analyzing records not maintaining them?

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#76

Post by smashface »

Skimmed article mostly.

Could things be better? Sure. But saying we're "wasting" all this time seems a little disingenuous. How much time do people spend maintaining tractor equipment to grow crops? Or really any tools of any trade?

The equipment and tools we use let us be more productive overall with certain tradeoffs.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#77

Post by jrockway »

mdavidn wrote: post #46
oceanplexian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real “safety” problem with AI. Since it’s so good at generating convincingly wrong answers, eventually we are going to build it into all sorts of mission critical systems and and everything from finance to healthcare will start to accumulate sophisticated, non deterministic failures over time. Like a trojan horse or a perhaps a civilization-level virus.

It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

It will be interesting to see. People are already involved in business-critical processes, and they have a far-from-100% success rate. You can see this with self-driving cars; 0.00001% of the time, they decide to swerve into oncoming traffic for no reason. But they can't get drunk! So whether or not that's a win is something that only time can tell. (People will be outraged, because no person would ever do what the AI did, but what matters are the numbers in aggregate. One could also argue; why should I have to put up with this when I never drink and drive? It's a good point and involves philosophical discussions about free will and all that.)

I guarantee people will be mad when an AI chatbot denies their insurance or customer service claim. But I have a friend who works in customer service and it feels like half her job is correcting the mistakes other customer service agents made. If the first line support was AI, would it change much, other than not paying people to make a bunch of mistakes?

Again, it's going to be painful while we try it out and get the data. It feels like it's going to be worse, and individual anecdotes will make each fuckup seem even worse than it is. But it seems inevitable that we're going to get the data. The only way to get VC writing software right now seems to be by tying your company to AI. That means a lot of experiments are about to leak out into the world. We'll learn a lot.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#78

Post by jrockway »

1propionyl wrote: post #74
mdavidn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

No, it is dissimilar. Humans learn over time. Humans have social pressures. Humans have explanatory rather than merely predictive models about what they do. Deviations by humans from expected standard behavior often produce better rather than worse results. The list goes on.

The philosophical question is whether "social pressure" and "reward function" are the same thing.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#80

Post by shswkna »

I believe that most people that make decisions that impact a large number of people the world over, simply have a too narrow experience of the world, and of other people’s situations. They know their own reality and think that this is how others experience life as well.

This is the root cause of many problems in the world.

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