Comment by adastra22
It feels like you’re blaming the AI engineers here, that they built it this way out of ignorance or something. Look into interpretability research. It is a hard problem!
It feels like you’re blaming the AI engineers here, that they built it this way out of ignorance or something. Look into interpretability research. It is a hard problem!
I’m sorry you don’t like it. But this has very strong old-man-yells-at-cloud vibes. This train is moving, whether you want it to or not.
Professionals use tools that work, whether they know why it works is of little consequence. It took 100 years to explain the steam engine. That didn’t stop us from making factories and railroads.
> It took 100 years to explain the steam engine. That didn’t stop us from making factories and railroads.
You keep saying this, why do you believe it so strongly? Because I don't believe this is true. Why do you?
And then, even assuming it's completely true exactly as stated; shouldn't we have higher standards than that when dealing with things that people interact with? Boiler explosions are bad right? And we should do everything we can to prove stuff works the way we want and expect? Do you think AI, as it's currently commonly used, helps do that?
Because I’m trained as a physicist and (non-software) engineer and I know my field’s history? Here’s the first result that comes up on Google. Seems accurate from a quick skim: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...
And yes we should seek to understand new inventions. Which we are doing right now, in the form of interpretability research.
We should not be making Luddite calls to halt progress simply because our analytic capabilities haven’t caught up to our progress in engineering.
I am blaming the developers who use AI because they're willing to sacrifice intellectual control in trade for something that I find has minimal value.
I agree it's likely to be a complex or intractable problem. But I don't enjoy watching my industry revert down the professionalism scale. Professionals don't choose tools that they can't explain how it works. If your solution to understanding if your tool is still functional is inventing an amusing name and trying to use that as the heuristic, because you have no better way to determine if it's still working correctly. That feels like it might be a problem, no?