In world war II testing of homing torpedoes had the same fluke. I think the problem with automation is seeking general automation. The word can have two oppose

In world war II testing of homing torpedoes had the same fluke. I think the problem with automation is seeking general automation. The word can have two opposed meanings: constrained behavior, as in "if X happens, the system will automatically do Y" and flexible behavior, as in "whatever you say to the chatbot, it will concoct a response that engenders a natural flow of conversation". If you want a system to be autonomous, you need constrained behavior. It takes a lot of time to debug and work out all edge cases. Flexible behavior is bound to run into trouble at some point. I think that is the fundamental issue with the LLM-chatbot-agents stack approach to AI. It looks autonomous at the surface, but the flexibility is bought at the cost of reliability. When you strain a system based on that stack it breaks. But the illusion of flexible behavior looking autonomous before it breaks is too strong.