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1979 presentation at IBM: “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.” There are lots of bullshit
by jandrese 2y ago
1979 presentation at IBM:
“A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
There are lots of bullshit jobs that we could automate away, AI or no. This is far from a new problem. Our current "AI" solutions promise to do it cheaper, but detecting and dealing with "hallucinations" is turning out to be more expensive than anticipated and it's not at all clear to me that this will be the silver bullet that the likes of Sam Altman claims it will be.
Even if the AI solution makes fewer mistakes, the magnitude of those mistakes matter. The human might make transcription errors with patient data or other annoying but fixable clerical errors, while the AI may be perfect with transcription but make completely sensible sounding but ultimately nonsense diagnosis, with dangerous consequences.
- warkdarrior 2y ago1953 IBM also thought that "there is a world market for maybe five computers," so I am not sure their management views are relevant this many decades later.
- jandrese 2y agoPhilosophically the point still stands. If you delegate your management decisions to a computer and someone dies you can't put the computer in jail for murder. Ultimately a person must be responsible and that means you can't fully automate it unless you have perfect trust in the machine. It is only irrelevant in the degree to which companies have been able to skirt laws and literally get away with murder.