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I find this new paradigm of computing to be troubling: where AI call sites are treated as execution units with vague confidence windows of correctness, say 80%,
by _wire_ 8mo ago
I find this new paradigm of computing to be troubling: where AI call sites are treated as execution units with vague confidence windows of correctness, say 80%, and fussing over energy efficiency of primitives vs. confidence, to be a surprising and weird development in computing. It looks like a galactic scale (that's an Alan Kay reference) version of the "goto considered harmful" lesson is about to be learned with god knows how much harm incurred upon unsuspecting subjects of the new AI empire. Tolerating human degrees of error rates in processing by system units that can perform millions of times more computations than a human seems like an invitation to Armageddon. But I must not properly understand the scenarios and risks.
- TimAssay 8mo agoI share that concern. Treating probabilistic systems as if they were deterministic execution units is a big shift from traditional computing. What motivated this project wasn’t the idea that uncertainty is good..it’s that these systems are already being deployed, and today the only record of what happened is usually internal logs controlled by the operator. The goal here isn’t to make AI “safe” or correct. It’s to make the behavior observable in a way a third party can verify after the fact, even if they don’t trust the system owner. Your goto analogy is interesting, structured programming didn’t eliminate bugs, but it made programs understandable and debuggable. This is trying to add a similar layer of structure around AI calls: not confidence scores, just tamper-evident records of inputs, outputs, and context. If the paradigm turns out to be harmful, having reliable evidence of what actually happened seems better than reconstructing it from mutable logs.