this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Aye, sure, but you don't check the result of calculations manually, do you, because you trust the calculator.
Similarly, you probably don't stress test every joint on every car you get into, do you?
My point being that there is a point at which you do trust the tool sufficiently.
Is it at the state of cancer diagnosis? Definitely not. How about cooking? Yes, pretty much it is. I trust it more or less when cooking and making drinks.
I've also gotten a ton of actually helpfil medical information that real life doctors fucked up.
So yeah one should be critical but just don't be a complete luddite.
Do you know what else is math? Probability and statistics. AI cannot do math because it is not a suitable task for it. Seriously, who TF thinks that a rigorous well defined process should be fed into a statistical blackbox.
Do you know what else the engineer uses to optimize a product design? The answer may surprise you...
But unless your using an actual abacus, the person who built your calculator, or more likely programmed the OS you're running a calculator software on, you're still using a product made by a fallible person and which could have made a mistake.
Then neither can basic calculators. Or your trying to say that sometimes the input isn't clear enough for the AI to get the corrected calculation it could do correctly. Ie the interface is still unreliable.
But at some point, it will be reliable enough. And it's already reliable enough for cooking. It can still make mistakes, but if you understand the basics, you'll realise if there's some massive hallucination.
Ah, so the minimum wage people actually putting the cars together (there's one factory I know not far from me which every single one of my immigrant friends has been at for a week or two) are infallible, because engineering is โ at its core โ based on math?
You know you seem just as ridiculous as the guy you were arguing, who's claiming LLM's will cure cancer.
"Engineering is math and math is math thus all engineered products and all engineered software is perfect and infallible ... except for anything AI, WHICH IS TO BE BURNED AS HERECY."
;>
You misunderstand. It's not because the AI is better at medicine. It's because it's a tool which has got access to medical information, and the doctors I used were public doctors who dismissed me. Something again which you somehow think of as impossible, as your "brain has gone soft" and suffers from the just world fallacy.
With the aid of LLM's, I could actually input very medical questions, which the doctors would've probably known how to answer, had they actually listened to what I was saying. You're completely ignoring arrogance, bureaucracy, racism, sexism and agism.
If you want, I'll eat wheat right now and show you how I'll start having a high blood pressure, high HR, extremely anxiety and shitting orange floaty poop. Despite that, I have a doctors statement saying the test for celiacs is negative. We took the antigen test after I asked the doctor whether the antigen test actually requires being exposed in case of a false negative, as I was already avoiding gluten since I know to be allergic to it. She said "no it doesn't". After the test came back negative, she messaged me, indirectly admitting she had made a mistake. Now I've a complaint going on about her but these take literally years to process.
Ofc it was directed at you. You're a mindless softbrain who just has to be in the "anti-AI" bandwagon, because you're not capable of forming your own opinions, so you always just trail others and shout out what you think is the most successful thing you've heard. And you still use them, despite taking a stance like that in public. It's pathetic, really. I hope you grow out of it.
So you are saying that because cars are designed by engineers, you don't need to check that the brakes work, because engineering is magic and you trust it.
Are you talking about manual or digital calculators?
What happens when you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator?
Now unless you're using a machine in which you can clearly see every single part of it, such as an abacus, you can't be 100% sure it's actually working correctly. You may reliably assume that of such a base level of technology as calculators, and of calculator software on your PC/phone, and you may also somewhat reliably trust that a car is in working order.
However, in my country the law actually does mention that you're required to check that all lights, indicators, and safety equipment functions before going out on the road, but if everyone actually did that everywhere in the world, the whole gimmick of cutting brake lines wouldn't exist.
Now is AI way more unreliable, and actually hallucinates things? Yes. But were search engines pretty much equally unreliable in the early days of the world wide web? Also yes. That's why you still hear people sneering "oh, did you Google that?". Yes, obviously I used a search engine to search for information, but I also known how to verify the sources of any information I find with it.
The modern version is LLM, a few years back it was "oh did you read that on Wikipedia" and before that is was general derision at all search engines.
As if someone actually fucking took the time to walk to a library anymore to spend an hour looking at books which might talk about the subject you have a question about and might be several decades old and have out of date information.
The "tldr" or "do your own research" of the pseudointellectual. I'm confident you're perfectly capable of understanding what I said. You just don't want to answer because it'd show your logic sucks and you can't form your own opinions.