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Former Microsoft VP says Microsoft missed the AI wave like the internet and mobile, as Copilot scales back in Windows 11 (www.windowslatest.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 3 months ago* (18 children)

The list of valid use cases for AI is bound by “what is the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here”

Its not because humans make those mistakes all the time. It doesn't need to be %100, it just needs to be like 95% to be better than humans.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

    My point is that for Agentic AI mistakes with catastrophic consequences are just as likelly as minor mistakes, which is not the case for people because humans can spot the "obviously stupid" or "obviously dangerous", plus they make more of an effort to avoid mistakes that can have very bad consequences, so they tend to make catastrophic mistakes will less probability than minor mistakes.

    People giving psychological advice are incredibly unlikely to tell suicidal people to "kill yourself", those giving food recipes are incredibly unlikely to say that pizza should have glue on top or those deploying software in Production are incredibly unlikely to delete the whole fucking Production environment including backups.

    So even if the total rate of mistakes of an an Agentic AI was less than a human, its rate of catastropic mistakes would still be much higher than a human.

    This is however not obvious unless one actually analises the risk profile of using Agentic AI in a specific place in a specific process, a skill very few people have plus it requires information about and/or understanding of Agentic AI which itself very few people have and the AI vendors activelly do not want people to have.

    So you end up with an e-mail fluffing and defluffing machine being used to summarize and store medical info about patients and then down the line somebody gets given something that kills them because the data on file had a critical mistake.

    This is why I said that its "the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here" that limit Agentic AI suitability: because generally you're going to have way more catastrophic mistakes with an AI that you will even with even an human with no domain experience.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    generally you’re going to have way more catastrophic mistakes with an AI that you will even with even an human with no domain experience.

    That's just not even true. People with no experience are going to fuck shit up completely. We have a human president and look where that's getting us.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    Even people with zero experience in counseling don't tell a person who is thinking of committing suicide to "kill themselves" and even those with zero culinary experience don't tell others they're supposed to put glue on top pizza when you're making it.

    To do that a human needs not just have zero experience but actually have no common sense whatsoever.

    Further, even with such people, it's only if they've been given the tools to do things with a huge impact that it becomes a problem: that's pretty much "child with a loaded gun" situations.

    The number of humans that inept given such power is minuscule (pretty much just children given loaded guns), whilst every single Agentic AI out there is that stupid and they're currently being given "loaded guns" all the time.

    The problem is exactly that Agentic AIs are being given adult responsibilities and have the capacity for complex operations whilst having the common sense and reasoning abilities equivalent to those of a small child.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    which is not the case for people because humans can spot the “obviously stupid” or “obviously dangerous”

    No AI was used in the creation of these clusterfucks:

    1. The Lake Peigneur Maelstrom - In November 1980, Texaco was conducting exploratory oil drilling directly on top of a shallow, 10-foot-deep freshwater lake. Operating directly underneath that same lake was a massive, active multi-level salt mine

    2. The Banqiao "Iron Dam" Collapse (China, 1975) Built in the early 1950s for flood control, the Banqiao earthen dam was heavily reinforced with Soviet engineering assistance and proudly nicknamed the "Iron Dam" by the government, which declared it completely unbreakable

    3. The Capsizing of the Vasa Warship (Sweden, 1628) In 1628, King Gustavus Adolphus built the Vasa, an opulent warship meant to serve as the crown jewel of the Swedish Navy. It was designed to intimidate enemies with unprecedented firepower.

    4. The gas tank in the back of the Ford Pinto.

    5. The Tesla Cybertruck (well, maybe some AI got in there, but the core bad ideas were well established before ChatGPT was "a thing".)

    6. Lead in gasoline

    7. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (New York, 1911) The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the top floors of a Manhattan building, employing hundreds of young immigrant women. Management routinely ignored basic industrial safety measures to maximize profits and prevent employee theft. The "Obviously Dangerous" Reality: Locking workers inside a high-rise room filled with flammable textiles and scraps creates a lethal death trap in an emergency.

    8. Bhopal 1984

    9. Chernobyl 1986

    10. The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (Sheffield, UK, 1989) During an FA Cup semifinal match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, thousands of fans arrived outside the Leppings Lane end of the stadium just before kickoff, creating a massive, chaotic bottleneck at the turnstiles. The "Obviously Dangerous" Reality: Opening a massive exit gate to let thousands of frantic people rush blindly down a narrow tunnel into an already overcrowded, fenced-in terrace creates a lethal human crush.

    11. The Who - December 3, 1979 at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

    12. School shootings...

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I don't think you understand either the concept of Statistics or the one of common sense.

    You're comparing frequent extreme events of an obviously nonsensical nature by LLMs given very limited responsibility (like the one were it tells a person with suicidal thoughts to "kill yourself") with rare events due to design failures of highly complex systems in situations of huge responsibility.

    That's not merely as mismatched as an "apples" and "oranges" comparison, that's as mismatched as an "apples" and "major engineering project" comparison.

    Now ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for apple pie.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    highly complex systems in situations of huge responsibility.

    What's complex about "there's a salt mine under this lake you're drilling in?" Or "you're putting a gas tank in the most common impact crumple zone on the vehicle?" or "We've seen this problem before, many times, but we're just going to continue to let it happen again and again?"

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    When human makes a mistake, they learn, they continue to enrich humanity, they make a blueprint how not to make the same mistake again, if not for humanity, but at least for themselves. It also fuels some creativity so one mistake might lead to something good later.
    When a mistake generator makes a mistake, it's just another mistake in a pile of mistakes that only worsen our collective human experience.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    When human makes a mistake, they learn, they continue to enrich humanity

    Very few humans do that. Vast majority is far more sloppy than any AI slop I've ever seen.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (8 children)

    Don't fall into this nihilistic bullshit, if humans weren't capable of learning we wouldn't be here in the first place. This narrative isn't true and doesn't help. It's all invented by religions of old to better control humanity, and it wasn't true then and isn't true now

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (7 children)

    Do bees learn? Like how to deal with mites? Or do they just die off every 45 days and only get replaced by bees who accidentally happen to be a little better at dealing with mites?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    I am not an expert on insectology or beeology, I don't actually know do they learn or not. An emergent entity of a hive seems to be learning better than the individual insect, but we're learning so much about them even now, I don't feel comfortable to make any speculations.
    I know about mammals a bit more, and know that humans do learn, but the hive mind learning works worse than in hiving insects.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    I wouldn't say "if humans weren’t capable of learning we wouldn’t be here in the first place" - I would say "by random evolution of circumstances, humans are where we are today - some capable of learning, some apparently not."

    the (human) hive mind learning works worse than in hiving insects.

    That's an entirely opinion driven statement. What is better, or worse? From whose perspective? Do you know what you don't know? If you think you do, you're wrong.

    From my perspective, people are a squishy mess. AI/LLM are also somewhat of a squishy mess, but I find them to be a lot more consistent and predictable in their behavior than randomly selected people. And, as far as the hiring process to find "the right" people for a particular job, that's a long complicated unpredictable usually costly and error prone process, even before you get to the point that the people you have engaged for a certain task might start to learn and improve in their role. I can hire AI agents for the equivalent of pennies per hour of equivalent human output, and while they have their issues, I can get as many of them as I want with that same predictable behavior / capability for just a few dollars more. They haven't started suing for slip and fall (yet), their performance doesn't degrade based on time of day, day of the week, phase of the moon. They don't call out sick, or pregnant. They don't want healthcare insurance... whatever they can do, they would seem to be the ideal employees to do it.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Boy if you really think that, you're drinking so much cool-aid it's dripping from your other end already. That's terrifying in their own right.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    No, actually I work in a field where we often interview 10+ candidates (AFTER the HR screening process) and STILL haven't seen one who appears capable of the job. They have the appropriate degrees, they have "years of experience in a related field" but... they don't seem (through the interview process) even remotely capable of learning the tasks at hand well enough to be a productive member of the team.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    There are two possible explanation to this phenomenon come to mind. Either everyone is stupid zombie, and you're the only one smart, intelligent, capable, uniquely so. Or, you, like a significant portion of non-qualified interviewers, suck at conducting the interview process which gives you an illusion that everyone is stupid and you're smart, and you don't want to do anything about it because being uniquely smart gives you good feelings that you don't want to shatter.

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