5 ms·

There will be many more things like this and it’s an elephant in the room for the supposed mass replacement of people with AI. Some human still has to be accou

by cmiles8 8mo ago

There will be many more things like this and it’s an elephant in the room for the supposed mass replacement of people with AI. Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. You can make humans more productive but for the foreseeable future you can’t take the human out of the loop to have an AI implementation that’s not a disaster/lawsuit waiting to happen. That, probably more than anything else, is why companies just aren’t seeing the much promised mass step change in productivity from AI and why so many companies are now saying they see zero ROI from AI efforts. The lowest hanging fruit will be low value rote repetitive tasks like the whole India offshoring industry, which will be the first to vaporize if AI does start replacing humans. But until companies see success on the lowest of lowest hanging fruit on en-mass labor replacement with AI things higher up on the value chain will remain relatively safe. PS: Nearly every mass layoff recently citing “AI productivity” hasn’t withstood scrutiny. They all seem to be just poorly performing companies slashing staff after overhiring, which management looking for any excuse other than just admitting that.

fidotron 8mo ago
> Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. The turning point will be when threatening an AI with being unplugged for screwing up works in motivating it to stop making things up. Some people will rightly point out that is kind of what the training process is already. If we go around this loop enough times it will get there.
- Hendrikto 8mo ago
  You are making a lot of assumptions here. You assume, among other things, that AI has self-preservation drive, can be threatened, can be motivated, and above all that we know how to accomplish that and are already doing so. I would dispute all of that.
  - yes_man 8mo ago
    For now maybe not. (Maybe). But just as evolution in nature, isn’t it likely that in the future the AIs that have a preservation drive are the ones that survive and proliferate? Seeing they optimize for their survival and proliferation, and not blindly what they were trained on. I am not discounting this happening already, not by the LLMs necessarily being sentient but at least being intelligent enough to emulate sentience. It’s just that for now, humanity is in control of what AI models are being deployed.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - cess11 8mo ago
      Is this an expectation you have towards, say, NPC:s in games?
      - yes_man 8mo ago
        Put an LLM inside the NPCs in an open world RPG full of dangerous enemies. The LLMs that are more prone to emulate self-preservation will be more likely to survive over ones that have a lesser drive. We should not act surprised if that generalizes to some degree to for example AI agents. Ones that emulate self-preservation might optimize for behavior that results in those models becoming more successful, more popular. And this feedback loop might embed more such properties into future iterations of the models.
    - adithyassekhar 8mo ago
      Claude does this if you keep pestering it about something, it will go from friendly to shooing away you.
hek2sch 8mo ago
Isn't just the issue stemming simply from not using the right tool? When the stakes are high and you should be checking details, the right tools are grounded Ai solutions like nouswise and notebooklm and not the general purpose chatbots that almost everyone knows they might hallucinate. I also do believe that this use case is definitely a low hanging fruit to automat a lot of manual work but it comes with new requirements like transparency to help with verifying the responses.
- edgarvaldes 8mo ago
  Is this a solved problem using the right tools?
  - noelsusman 8mo ago
    It would be relatively trivial to build a system that gives an LLM the tools necessary to go through each citation in a legal brief and verify its authenticity, and that's something I think opus-4.6 or gpt-5.3 could complete reliably.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Isn't just the issue stemming simply from not using the right tool? What suggests this judge was not using the very best chatbot?
torben-friis 8mo ago
I think this is an even clearer case than usual. With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work, but they exist for lawyers and doctors for example. So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  > With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work Technically true, but if you want the IP to be covered by copyright you better make sure they're not using AI or you'll find out that there are some serious legal limitations in your future when you aim to either pick up investment or sell your IP.
  - cmiles8 8mo ago
    Correct. The US has already ruled that there are no IP protections for AI generated content
    - visarga 8mo ago
      An unqualified statement, the user has copyright over the elements they provide. In an image if they make manual edits for example, those are protected. In a modern agentic codebase the code itself is least valuable, what counts more are the specs and tests.
      - jacquesm 8mo ago
        Good luck with that argument in court.
- gortok 8mo ago
  > So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty. I am particularly against this point of view, because we as a community have long touted how computers can do the job better and faster, and that computers don’t make mistakes. When there are bugs, they’re seen as flaws in the system and rectified, by programmers. When there are gaps between user expectations and how the software works, it’s our job to manage those gaps and reduce the gap. In the case of AI, we are somehow, probably because we know it’s non-deterministic, turning that social contract we had developed with users on its head. Now, that’s just the way it is and it’s up to them to know if the computer is lying to them. We have absolved ourselves of both the technical and the non-technical responsibilities to ensure the computer doesn’t lie to the user, or subverts their expectations, or acts in a way contrary to human logic. AI may be different to us in that it’s non-deterministic, but that’s all the more reason that we’re responsible to ensure AI adoption aligns to the social contract we created with users. If we can’t do that with AI then it’s up to us to stop chasing endless dollars and be forthright with users that facts are optional when it comes to AI.
raincole 8mo ago
I don't believe most countries hold judges accountable for bad ruling at all even before AI era. "Check and balance, except judiciary."
- AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  In the US, local/state judges often are elected (probably varies by state). Federal judges can be impeached.
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  In the UK lower court judges are sometimes removed for misconduct. Only the king (at the petition of parliament) can remove a high court or appeal court judge, and that's only ever happened once, in 1830.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  It wasn't just a bad ruling. It was judicial misconduct.
- JimTheMan 8mo ago
  The appeals court should make a ruling on this.
general_reveal 8mo ago
Or, AI is going to be like when land lines became unnecessary when cellphones showed up in India. India may get to skip an entire intellectual generation due to the ability of a cheap model to educate (in any language). The narrative that an entire population are “worth” less, paid less , know less, live less … Fuck this less shit, embrace the paradigm shift. God is finally providing the remedial support through the miracle of AI.
- jazzypants 8mo ago
  We've had YouTube for two decades now. Cheap education was already available for those who wanted it.
  - general_reveal 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    Youtube is insanely ineffecient compared to a good AI model in interactive mode.
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      True. An "AI agent" is >100x as fast at mistakingly wiping C:.
      - jacquesm 8mo ago
        I don't let AI agents anywhere near my systems. I meant just interactive as in you talk to it in a browser a-la chatgpt compared to trying to find the same information from videos.
    - fc417fc802 8mo ago
      Youtube is insanely inefficient even compared to a well written and organized wall of text. I guarantee that archwiki will get me on track faster than watching videos but google's freely available model will give me the exact step by step explanation that I needed nearly every time.
amelius 8mo ago
We should have more hygiene when it comes to AI. Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. Failing to do so (or tampering with it) should be considered bad hygiene, and should be treated like a doctor who doesn't wash their hands before surgery.
- sharpy 8mo ago
  What will that accomplish? Does it give license to developers to check in code that they don't understand/trust fully? Ultimately, people should be responsible for the code they commit, no matter how it was written. If AI generates code that is so bad that it warrants putting up warning sign, it shouldn't be checked in.
  - everforward 8mo ago
    It could be useful for downstream/AI processes. Eg hand-written code only requires 70% code coverage because the cost for higher coverage is significantly higher, while AI generated code requires 90% coverage because the cost of getting coverage is lower. Especially if the prompt is attached to the metadata. Then reviewers could note how you could have changed the prompt or potentially point an AI at the bug and ask it to add something to AGENTS.md to prevent that in the future.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  > Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. That's exactly my proposed solution: https://jacquesmattheij.com/classes-of-originality/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/classes-of-originality/
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. Why not start with manual tagging, like "Ad"?
ForHackernews 8mo ago
Counterpoint: No one ever gets fired or goes to jail when big tech firms break the law. Companies will put out an apology, pay whatever small fine is imposed, and continue with illegal AI usage at scale.
ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
> Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. In law, someone always hangs. I think a number of American lawyers have been sanctioned for using AI slop. In other vocations ... not so much. I think that one of the reasons that insurance likes AI so much, is that they can say that it was "the computer" that made the decision that killed Little Timmy.
WarmWash 8mo ago
>why so many companies are now saying they see zero ROI from AI efforts. I strongly suspect this is because workers are pocketing the gains for themselves. Report XYZ usually takes a week to write. It now takes a day. The other 4 days are spent looking busy. The MIT report that found all these companies were getting nowhere with AI, also found that almost every worker was using AI almost daily. But using their personal account rather than the corporate one.
- onionisafruit 8mo ago
  If that were the case, this site and certain subreddits would have a lot of posts and comments with people crowing about how much time they are getting back. I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t gone looking for it either.
  - butterbomb 8mo ago
    > people crowing about how much time they are getting back Trust me, if it wasn’t for RTO, I probably would be lol.
- beachtaxidriver 8mo ago
  Because the amount of ai slop code from peers and the amount of ai slop emails to read from management has exploded.
- adithyassekhar 8mo ago
  Quiet the contrary, companies layoff all roles (frontend, backend, qa, devops, even ui/ux) and handle a project to one competent dev. And asks them to deliver it in 1/3rd the time it would have took with a proper team. It's happening at places I know. This thread on reddit is 100% same: https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm I can't even imagine the stress from context switching, and since people don't realize this is still work, they do this late into the night as well.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
bookofjoe 8mo ago
>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. I remember growing up and always hearing "The computer is down" as an excuse for why things were cancelled/offices closed/buses and trains not running/ad infinitum. At some point I read a article that pointed out that the reason the computer was down was because a person made a [coding] error: the computer itself was fine. I've yet to read about how a person who caused the computer to be down was disciplined.
- Gud 8mo ago
  Why does a person need to be disciplined because they made a mistake?
  - bookofjoe 8mo ago
    A couple years ago I was at the Virginia DMV along with about 50 other people doing DMV things when all of a sudden someone comes out from the back and gets in front of all the service windows and announces "The DMV is now closed for the day due to a computer problem. Please leave now." Some of the people in that crowd had driven hours to get there. That's why the person who made the coding error should have been disciplined.
    - Gud 8mo ago
      How do you determine it was the person who had done the "coding error"s fault? Sounds to me they are seriously underfunded and you are pointing the blame at an individual in a systemic issue.
      - bookofjoe 8mo ago
        The recurring fact of major companies' websites being down for prolonged periods indicates coding errors are not the result of underfunding.
      - bookofjoe 8mo ago
        5 things: 1. https://www.stonkys.com/ https://www.stonkys.com/ is a bold creation: congratulations 2. white on black is harder on the eyes than black on white 3. how do you decide which items to post/feature? 4. you should have an "About" link/page 5. you should have a "Contact" link
blackoil 8mo ago
> You can make humans more productive If productivity is 10x unless work increases 10x jobs will be gone.
- kudokatz 8mo ago
  In about 1930, Keynes wrote "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" [1] wherein he wrote: "I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick ... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." While there's no guarantee that what Smith got wrong then is the same as now, it can be a reasonable outcome that "the jobs" won't just disappear. ---- Keynes also speculated on what to do with newfound time as a result of investment returns on the back of productivity [1]: "Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us ... Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." The modern FIRE movement shows that living at a dated "standard of living" for 10-15 years can free one from work forever. Yet that's not what most people do today. I would suggest that there are deeper aspects of human drive, psychology, and varying concepts of "morality" that are actually bigger factors in what happens to "jobs". [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
idontwantthis 8mo ago
I think there was an SMBC comic recently on this subject. Basically a whole responsibility industry crops up. You get paid to be the fall guy for an AI if it ever screws up since Someone needs to be held accountable.
coldtea 8mo ago
>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. Why? The logic of ever less personal pride, involvement, and care, is eventually to just put the blame on AI and be done with it. Issues? Casualties? It's a bug, somebody fixes it and we move on. Or is just a cost we need to get used to to live in the great new world of AI. We're in an era where nobody involved goes to jail for the Epstein case, and the world keeps turning, and we think people will care if nobody goes to jail if somebody loses their pension or gets wrongly imprisoned or dies on an operating table because of AI mistake? If anything, legal, union and other limitations like that on who gets to decide (having to have a human ultimately responsible) might be torn down, to fullu embrace the blame-shifting capabilities of the digital bureucracy.
alok-g 8mo ago
>> Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. It does not happen this way there even with just humans presiding. Judgments written by humans there are on an average total garbage. Edit: Someone wrote a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244909
littlecorner 8mo ago
>>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. Now I'm trying to imagine a way they could apply a criminal charge against an AI in such a way that it would prevent the AI from being used in official capacity or something

by cmiles8 8mo ago

fidotron 8mo ago

> Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. The turning point will be when threatening an AI with being unplugged for screwing up works in motivating it to stop making things up. Some people will rightly point out that is kind of what the training process is already. If we go around this loop enough times it will get there.

Hendrikto 8mo ago
You are making a lot of assumptions here. You assume, among other things, that AI has self-preservation drive, can be threatened, can be motivated, and above all that we know how to accomplish that and are already doing so. I would dispute all of that.
- yes_man 8mo ago
  For now maybe not. (Maybe). But just as evolution in nature, isn’t it likely that in the future the AIs that have a preservation drive are the ones that survive and proliferate? Seeing they optimize for their survival and proliferation, and not blindly what they were trained on. I am not discounting this happening already, not by the LLMs necessarily being sentient but at least being intelligent enough to emulate sentience. It’s just that for now, humanity is in control of what AI models are being deployed.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cess11 8mo ago
    Is this an expectation you have towards, say, NPC:s in games?
    - yes_man 8mo ago
      Put an LLM inside the NPCs in an open world RPG full of dangerous enemies. The LLMs that are more prone to emulate self-preservation will be more likely to survive over ones that have a lesser drive. We should not act surprised if that generalizes to some degree to for example AI agents. Ones that emulate self-preservation might optimize for behavior that results in those models becoming more successful, more popular. And this feedback loop might embed more such properties into future iterations of the models.
  - adithyassekhar 8mo ago
    Claude does this if you keep pestering it about something, it will go from friendly to shooing away you.

hek2sch 8mo ago

Isn't just the issue stemming simply from not using the right tool? When the stakes are high and you should be checking details, the right tools are grounded Ai solutions like nouswise and notebooklm and not the general purpose chatbots that almost everyone knows they might hallucinate. I also do believe that this use case is definitely a low hanging fruit to automat a lot of manual work but it comes with new requirements like transparency to help with verifying the responses.

edgarvaldes 8mo ago
Is this a solved problem using the right tools?
- noelsusman 8mo ago
  It would be relatively trivial to build a system that gives an LLM the tools necessary to go through each citation in a legal brief and verify its authenticity, and that's something I think opus-4.6 or gpt-5.3 could complete reliably.
chrisjj 8mo ago
> Isn't just the issue stemming simply from not using the right tool? What suggests this judge was not using the very best chatbot?

torben-friis 8mo ago

I think this is an even clearer case than usual. With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work, but they exist for lawyers and doctors for example. So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty.

jacquesm 8mo ago
> With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work Technically true, but if you want the IP to be covered by copyright you better make sure they're not using AI or you'll find out that there are some serious legal limitations in your future when you aim to either pick up investment or sell your IP.
- cmiles8 8mo ago
  Correct. The US has already ruled that there are no IP protections for AI generated content
  - visarga 8mo ago
    An unqualified statement, the user has copyright over the elements they provide. In an image if they make manual edits for example, those are protected. In a modern agentic codebase the code itself is least valuable, what counts more are the specs and tests.
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      Good luck with that argument in court.
gortok 8mo ago
> So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty. I am particularly against this point of view, because we as a community have long touted how computers can do the job better and faster, and that computers don’t make mistakes. When there are bugs, they’re seen as flaws in the system and rectified, by programmers. When there are gaps between user expectations and how the software works, it’s our job to manage those gaps and reduce the gap. In the case of AI, we are somehow, probably because we know it’s non-deterministic, turning that social contract we had developed with users on its head. Now, that’s just the way it is and it’s up to them to know if the computer is lying to them. We have absolved ourselves of both the technical and the non-technical responsibilities to ensure the computer doesn’t lie to the user, or subverts their expectations, or acts in a way contrary to human logic. AI may be different to us in that it’s non-deterministic, but that’s all the more reason that we’re responsible to ensure AI adoption aligns to the social contract we created with users. If we can’t do that with AI then it’s up to us to stop chasing endless dollars and be forthright with users that facts are optional when it comes to AI.

raincole 8mo ago

I don't believe most countries hold judges accountable for bad ruling at all even before AI era. "Check and balance, except judiciary."

AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
In the US, local/state judges often are elected (probably varies by state). Federal judges can be impeached.
RobotToaster 8mo ago
In the UK lower court judges are sometimes removed for misconduct. Only the king (at the petition of parliament) can remove a high court or appeal court judge, and that's only ever happened once, in 1830.
chrisjj 8mo ago
It wasn't just a bad ruling. It was judicial misconduct.
JimTheMan 8mo ago
The appeals court should make a ruling on this.

general_reveal 8mo ago

Or, AI is going to be like when land lines became unnecessary when cellphones showed up in India. India may get to skip an entire intellectual generation due to the ability of a cheap model to educate (in any language). The narrative that an entire population are “worth” less, paid less , know less, live less … Fuck this less shit, embrace the paradigm shift. God is finally providing the remedial support through the miracle of AI.

jazzypants 8mo ago
We've had YouTube for two decades now. Cheap education was already available for those who wanted it.
- general_reveal 8mo ago
  [dead]
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  Youtube is insanely ineffecient compared to a good AI model in interactive mode.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    True. An "AI agent" is >100x as fast at mistakingly wiping C:.
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      I don't let AI agents anywhere near my systems. I meant just interactive as in you talk to it in a browser a-la chatgpt compared to trying to find the same information from videos.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    Youtube is insanely inefficient even compared to a well written and organized wall of text. I guarantee that archwiki will get me on track faster than watching videos but google's freely available model will give me the exact step by step explanation that I needed nearly every time.

amelius 8mo ago

We should have more hygiene when it comes to AI. Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. Failing to do so (or tampering with it) should be considered bad hygiene, and should be treated like a doctor who doesn't wash their hands before surgery.

sharpy 8mo ago
What will that accomplish? Does it give license to developers to check in code that they don't understand/trust fully? Ultimately, people should be responsible for the code they commit, no matter how it was written. If AI generates code that is so bad that it warrants putting up warning sign, it shouldn't be checked in.
- everforward 8mo ago
  It could be useful for downstream/AI processes. Eg hand-written code only requires 70% code coverage because the cost for higher coverage is significantly higher, while AI generated code requires 90% coverage because the cost of getting coverage is lower. Especially if the prompt is attached to the metadata. Then reviewers could note how you could have changed the prompt or potentially point an AI at the bug and ask it to add something to AGENTS.md to prevent that in the future.
jacquesm 8mo ago
> Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. That's exactly my proposed solution: https://jacquesmattheij.com/classes-of-originality/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/classes-of-originality/
chrisjj 8mo ago
> Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI. Why not start with manual tagging, like "Ad"?

ForHackernews 8mo ago

Counterpoint: No one ever gets fired or goes to jail when big tech firms break the law. Companies will put out an apology, pay whatever small fine is imposed, and continue with illegal AI usage at scale.

ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago

> Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. In law, someone always hangs. I think a number of American lawyers have been sanctioned for using AI slop. In other vocations ... not so much. I think that one of the reasons that insurance likes AI so much, is that they can say that it was "the computer" that made the decision that killed Little Timmy.

WarmWash 8mo ago

>why so many companies are now saying they see zero ROI from AI efforts. I strongly suspect this is because workers are pocketing the gains for themselves. Report XYZ usually takes a week to write. It now takes a day. The other 4 days are spent looking busy. The MIT report that found all these companies were getting nowhere with AI, also found that almost every worker was using AI almost daily. But using their personal account rather than the corporate one.

onionisafruit 8mo ago
If that were the case, this site and certain subreddits would have a lot of posts and comments with people crowing about how much time they are getting back. I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t gone looking for it either.
- butterbomb 8mo ago
  > people crowing about how much time they are getting back Trust me, if it wasn’t for RTO, I probably would be lol.
beachtaxidriver 8mo ago
Because the amount of ai slop code from peers and the amount of ai slop emails to read from management has exploded.
adithyassekhar 8mo ago
Quiet the contrary, companies layoff all roles (frontend, backend, qa, devops, even ui/ux) and handle a project to one competent dev. And asks them to deliver it in 1/3rd the time it would have took with a proper team. It's happening at places I know. This thread on reddit is 100% same: https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm I can't even imagine the stress from context switching, and since people don't realize this is still work, they do this late into the night as well.
- bluGill 8mo ago

bookofjoe 8mo ago

>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. I remember growing up and always hearing "The computer is down" as an excuse for why things were cancelled/offices closed/buses and trains not running/ad infinitum. At some point I read a article that pointed out that the reason the computer was down was because a person made a [coding] error: the computer itself was fine. I've yet to read about how a person who caused the computer to be down was disciplined.

Gud 8mo ago
Why does a person need to be disciplined because they made a mistake?
- bookofjoe 8mo ago
  A couple years ago I was at the Virginia DMV along with about 50 other people doing DMV things when all of a sudden someone comes out from the back and gets in front of all the service windows and announces "The DMV is now closed for the day due to a computer problem. Please leave now." Some of the people in that crowd had driven hours to get there. That's why the person who made the coding error should have been disciplined.
  - Gud 8mo ago
    How do you determine it was the person who had done the "coding error"s fault? Sounds to me they are seriously underfunded and you are pointing the blame at an individual in a systemic issue.
    - bookofjoe 8mo ago
      The recurring fact of major companies' websites being down for prolonged periods indicates coding errors are not the result of underfunding.
    - bookofjoe 8mo ago
      5 things: 1. https://www.stonkys.com/ https://www.stonkys.com/ is a bold creation: congratulations 2. white on black is harder on the eyes than black on white 3. how do you decide which items to post/feature? 4. you should have an "About" link/page 5. you should have a "Contact" link

blackoil 8mo ago

> You can make humans more productive If productivity is 10x unless work increases 10x jobs will be gone.

kudokatz 8mo ago
In about 1930, Keynes wrote "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" [1] wherein he wrote: "I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick ... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." While there's no guarantee that what Smith got wrong then is the same as now, it can be a reasonable outcome that "the jobs" won't just disappear. ---- Keynes also speculated on what to do with newfound time as a result of investment returns on the back of productivity [1]: "Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us ... Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." The modern FIRE movement shows that living at a dated "standard of living" for 10-15 years can free one from work forever. Yet that's not what most people do today. I would suggest that there are deeper aspects of human drive, psychology, and varying concepts of "morality" that are actually bigger factors in what happens to "jobs". [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

idontwantthis 8mo ago

I think there was an SMBC comic recently on this subject. Basically a whole responsibility industry crops up. You get paid to be the fall guy for an AI if it ever screws up since Someone needs to be held accountable.

coldtea 8mo ago

>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. Why? The logic of ever less personal pride, involvement, and care, is eventually to just put the blame on AI and be done with it. Issues? Casualties? It's a bug, somebody fixes it and we move on. Or is just a cost we need to get used to to live in the great new world of AI. We're in an era where nobody involved goes to jail for the Epstein case, and the world keeps turning, and we think people will care if nobody goes to jail if somebody loses their pension or gets wrongly imprisoned or dies on an operating table because of AI mistake? If anything, legal, union and other limitations like that on who gets to decide (having to have a human ultimately responsible) might be torn down, to fullu embrace the blame-shifting capabilities of the digital bureucracy.

alok-g 8mo ago

>> Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. It does not happen this way there even with just humans presiding. Judgments written by humans there are on an average total garbage. Edit: Someone wrote a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244909

littlecorner 8mo ago

>>Some human still has to be accountable. Someone has to get fired / go to jail when something screws up. Now I'm trying to imagine a way they could apply a criminal charge against an AI in such a way that it would prevent the AI from being used in official capacity or something