I think the perspective here is completely wrong. The problem is that people are now building our world around tooling that eschews accountability . Over a decade ago now, I had a conversation with Gerald Sussman which had enormous influence on me: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ > At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were…
The fallacy here is the assumption that humans know why we do what we do. Much like modern LLMs we have an explanation, but it’s just something we cook up in our brain. Whether or not it’s the truth is far more complex.
Oddly, despite LLMs being these huge networks with billions of parameters, we still probably do understand it better than we do our own brains.
List the companies who received a fine worthy of the damage they caused in recent history. List the ones who didn't. It's not about judging. We are socializing the losses to the public and capitalizing the profits for the already wealthy.
We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds. She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that M…
McDonald's revenue in 1992 was almost $5,000,000,000.[0]
I think the perspective here is completely wrong. The problem is that people are now building our world around tooling that eschews accountability . Over a decade ago now, I had a conversation with Gerald Sussman which had enormous influence on me: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ > At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were…
About the blog you linked and not your comment: Doesn't symbolic AI have a lot of philosophical problems? Think back to Quine's two dogmas - you can't just say, "Let's understand the true meanings of these words and understand the proper mappings". There is no such thing as fixed meaning. I don't see how you get around that. Deep learning is admittedly an ugly solution, but it works better than symbolic AI at least.
List the companies who received a fine worthy of the damage they caused in recent history. List the ones who didn't. It's not about judging. We are socializing the losses to the public and capitalizing the profits for the already wealthy.
We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds. She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that M…
This is such a litmus test, this case. Yes, America does weird things with punitive damages. But the injuries were really severe and the negligence significant. More often you get class action lawsuits where everyone involved gets mailed a cheque for $3.
It's not just America. McDonald's UK got involved in the UK's biggest ever libel case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case ; leaflets distributed in 1985 ended up resulting in a human rights judgement in 2005, after a lifetime of litigation and millions spent.
I think the perspective here is completely wrong. The problem is that people are now building our world around tooling that eschews accountability . Over a decade ago now, I had a conversation with Gerald Sussman which had enormous influence on me: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ > At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were…
My team and I are firm that we are the ones accountable. LLMs are a tool like every other. Only that it's non deterministic. But I am the one using the tool. I am the one giving the tool access. I am the one who has to keep everything safe. I have shot myself in the foot using gparted in the past by wiping the wrong disk. gparted wasn't to blame. I was. Letting LLMs work freely without supervision sounds great but it…
This is the right approach.
I've been developing for 30 years and very much enjoy working with Ai. It's easy to see the Ai is just as good as the person using it. Deterministic or not, it's up for the dev to check the result (both code and behavior).
I compare the anti-ai articles like the one saying "ai deleted my prod db" similar to factory workers rioting and complaining about machines replacing them. Ai makes a good developer better, the tech industry always attracted fakers that wanted a piece of the pie and now that these people have their hands on a powerful too and connect it to their prod db, they cry in pain and frustration.
Like people with no license crashing a car and crying that cars are dangerous; They are but only because people use them dangerously.
I've made the same exact SVN mistake. My first week in my first Software Engineering job, accidentally deleted trunk and my team lead had to scramble to fix my mistake.
I will always remember how he told me "Don't worry, it happens fairly often".
List the companies who received a fine worthy of the damage they caused in recent history. List the ones who didn't. It's not about judging. We are socializing the losses to the public and capitalizing the profits for the already wealthy.
We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds. She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that M…
When healthcare is free the amount of damages is harder to claim maybe?
What's interesting is that in this article, the author describes making an understandable mistake (accidentally deleting Trunk aka main from source) and how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN. The actual "AI deleted my database" story is really more of a "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardr…
> "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardrails is dangerous."
Yes. However, if you choose to build on their platform you bear the responsibility to understand how it works. You could have chosen a different platform, or no platform. Instead you chose Railway. Given that, it's your responsibility to know how to use it safely.