Discussion
Back in the 1980s Mr. Griffiths taught Computer Science in my local school. Two maxims he repeated almost every week have stuck with me for decades.
"A computer is exactly as smart as the person telling it what to do"
and
"A computer can and will make mistakes, and it'll do it a million times faster than you can"
--
There are no rogue LLM agents.
Only negligent people telling computers what to do.
And letting them make mistakes a million times faster than ever before.
@jaz not exactly the same thing but it reminds me of this classic
@jaz True, true, true, true, and true.
@jaz Excellent Mr Griffiths. As translators (job now consumed by "AI" btw) we had a similar saying "each new tool lets you make mistakes quicker". From the manual typewriter to the translation environment tool with inbuilt neural machine translation.
@jaz There are no rogue LLM agents, as there are no rogue screwdrivers.
A scary difference is LLMs compress the whole gamut of opinions and alternatives. If the data ponders the Earth is flat, the LLM will reflect the "fact". And this applies to the so-called "reasoning" models too (a misleading label meaning the stats are more biased, hopefully toward Truth, but really about anything we claim truthy). Analysis and life is much simpler with screwdrivers (modulo jury-rigging and other jugaad).
@jaz GIGO was a big operating principle when I started learning programming.
@jaz Sort of. Now computers can tell computers what to do.
100% this
"...There are no rogue LLM agents.
Only negligent people telling computers what to do.
..."
Until some years ago, if some software did something wrong, it was the fault of the user, the programmer, or a hardware failure.
Now we have LLMs, which don't need any of those excuses, because they can make their own mistakes. That's their nature, and can't be fixed.
And we are giving them the power to do anything, knowing they are the most faulty kind of software ever.
@jaz very true. It reminds me of the saying “garbage in, garbage out” intentionally or unintentionally.
@jaz The AI Conundrum: As you explain programmers writing the base code for AI. Then the "learning" phase begins. The code engine pulls in a river of data that probably includes much of the malware and viruses ever created. Root kits, back doors, kiddie scripts and other snippets are available to agents that are self-teaching. As the Grok "MechaHitler" incident showed, QA/QC continues to be a problem. An AI agent could link to the Morris Worm incident of 1987 and attempt to emulate.
@jaz And while your attention is on effects, the cause of monopolizing energy markets, and other vital root infrastructure, continues to build the wealth of the .01%, who were 1%, before these increasingly successful abuses.
Graduate them with ethical scientists.
@jaz exactly! This is how I understand the usual maxim of "to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."
Thank you Mr Griffiths.
@jaz In nearly every circumstance where a computer under my control has "made a mistake", a human-generated mistake has been the root cause.
Often I see the source of that human-generated mistake looking at me in the mirror.
In the rare instance that it's the machine, it's a hardware fault like a failing DRAM module.
The teacher is right though when he says the computer will replicate that mistakes many times over. Computers are good at repetition, good and bad repetition alike.
@stuartl We will all come to miss deterministic repetition of error...
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@jaz
Roughly.
What LLMs have changed are some capabilities.
They generally provide no new magic insights. With much senior human supervision, OTOH they are quite capable of handling certain basic tasks that in the past were a bit on the hard side for automation.
(Don't mistake that for intelligence, just nice algorithms.)
Thus certain cost calculations in security have changed.
Something people like to forget, security starts with a threat assessment.
And "AI