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For a long time I was anti-licensure in tech; now with the bar being lowered to next to nothing, it seems as if licensure is more important than ever — not to p
by gortok 2mo ago
For a long time I was anti-licensure in tech; now with the bar being lowered to next to nothing, it seems as if licensure is more important than ever — not to protect this trade (though it will do that, and that is a benefit), but because the sheer amount of irresponsibility in the usage of LLMs and “AI” in general begs for licensure and adoption of a regulatory body for software in general.
- rafterydj 2mo agoThis is unfortunately a feeling I share. It wasn't until LLMs have become nearly ubiquitous at this point, and there has been zero realistic technological response to the dangers they present. Not to mention I suspect there may be some psychological element to being exposed to interactions with AI models and their nonsense for hours a day. Not all of it is nonsense....but you won't ever know for sure.
- 27183 2mo ago100%. I don't think "AI" has changed anything wrt to the responsibility of the tech industry in general. Tech has always been pretty much devoid of ethics or a sense of responsibility at the executive level (and therefore "management" more broadly). But before LLMs it was easier for ethical engineers to surreptitiously steer things towards responsible implementations. I suspect also competence correlates pretty strongly with intellectual honesty--narcissists and other personality defectives generally aren't terribly capable of the kind of introspection necessary to learn deeply. With the deluge of LLM slop, it's much harder for even a responsible manager to differentiate the competent from the incompetent, and now the dishonest, unethical folks have more leverage. So now the problem is highly visible. There's only one solution I can think of, and that's to hold individuals (not corporations) responsible for professional malfeasance.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoBut as you've made clear, the root of the problem is not with the engineer. Personally I think a corporate death penalty strikes a nice balance of holding companies and individuals responsible. If a company exercises sufficient malfeasance, it gets nationalized with no compensation for shareholders. Watch the incentives align real fast.
- 27183 2mo agoYeah that sounds great! A company guillotine is absolutely something I could get behind. Problem is I don't think there's any way it could possibly happen politically. Whereas we have a really strong existence proof for e.g. the Professional Engineer certification and other professional coherence mechanisms. That seems to work, albeit not without its own inefficiencies. I doubt anyone, though, would advocate for some kind of laissez-faire situation where the profit incentive aligns with the regulatory one. Historically that hasn't gone well. A lot of people died.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoPEs are demonstrably a partial solution at best. Fields with certified engineers still have financially motivated disasters (boeing goes the door plug). For better or worse, I think we'll see more political support for increased oversight of companies on the next free decades. I only hope it manifests in a useful way instead of a self-defeating way.
- 27183 2mo agoIt'll have to be pretty much all the ways. One way will stick. The rest will be forgotten failures.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoI'm afraid this is a situation where the first halfway plausible solution will "stick" and sap the pressure to change even if it doesn't do a good job.