Honestly, there isn’t much that you do that must be done with a high level of precision. I live in a world of precision. I’m in IT. I administrate the crap you all use. If I screw up, you can’t work. I must be precise and validate my work prior to implementation. This sometimes means large scale testing environments.
I once built a full on domain network, with an active directory server, file server and several clients to test… A script. Like, five virtual machines so I could test something. I had to install client software and everything. It took hours just preparing the lab so I could run, test, troubleshoot and ultimately debug the script before a single line of it landed on a production system. I verified the condition before and after the script, ran all kinds of different and varying tests to ensure that unexpected circumstances wasn’t going to mess it up. Testing took almost as long as the setup.
The script was only a few hundred lines, mostly checks and verifications. The “meat and potatoes” of the script was maybe a half dozen lines in the middle to set some values, run a program and that was about it. The first half was checks to make sure things existed and that the script wasn’t being thrown at a system where it didn’t need to be run, and thus would have an unexpected output if the core logic was to execute on a system which it was inappropriate to do those things. The trailing half was too check and verify that the script had accomplished it’s task and notify if there was any unexpected outcomes so they could be addressed promptly (before any of you fuckers notice).
I spent the better portion of two days getting five lines of commands to run in such a way that nobody would notice if they ran, and if anything went sideways that I didn’t account for, I could be on it like a fat kid with a candy bar.
That level of care and precision isn’t something that most people can even wrap their head around.
Meanwhile if your creative works are aided by AI, it’s just expression that’s affected, and for the most part, nobody even knows the difference, if you use AI to write emails, a lot of what’s being said, no big deal. It’s mostly filler text anyways. I’ve known a lot of people who write many words but say nothing with those words.
But if you screw up your taxes, well, the IRS is going to fuck your whole life up. Would you trust a fucking LLM with defending a court case where you’re accused of murder, and you’re facing life in prison? Probably not. Shit that needs to be done correctly the first time, will not be done by AI for a very, very long time. Taxes, legal work, and yes, even my job, won’t be done by AI anytime soon because bluntly, it has no idea what the fuck it’s doing.
well that’s sort of the point of this comic because the one thing you’d really want it to be good enough to do and would love to be able to trust something to do for you is the tax and all the other tasks in the comics are things you were pretty well able to do yourself before, probably wanted to do before, and if not exactly wanted, at least didn’t want something else to displace you in by taking over doing that task from now onwards especially if it was your actual job before. If displacing human workers for those tasks was the only problem, it’d be a sad but familiar story of progress but the fact that AI, at least for now is incapable of doing the part we’d all really love to have done for us is just the diarrhea icing on the dog turd cake.
Honestly, there isn’t much that you do that must be done with a high level of precision. I live in a world of precision. I’m in IT. I administrate the crap you all use. If I screw up, you can’t work. I must be precise and validate my work prior to implementation. This sometimes means large scale testing environments.
I once built a full on domain network, with an active directory server, file server and several clients to test… A script. Like, five virtual machines so I could test something. I had to install client software and everything. It took hours just preparing the lab so I could run, test, troubleshoot and ultimately debug the script before a single line of it landed on a production system. I verified the condition before and after the script, ran all kinds of different and varying tests to ensure that unexpected circumstances wasn’t going to mess it up. Testing took almost as long as the setup.
The script was only a few hundred lines, mostly checks and verifications. The “meat and potatoes” of the script was maybe a half dozen lines in the middle to set some values, run a program and that was about it. The first half was checks to make sure things existed and that the script wasn’t being thrown at a system where it didn’t need to be run, and thus would have an unexpected output if the core logic was to execute on a system which it was inappropriate to do those things. The trailing half was too check and verify that the script had accomplished it’s task and notify if there was any unexpected outcomes so they could be addressed promptly (before any of you fuckers notice).
I spent the better portion of two days getting five lines of commands to run in such a way that nobody would notice if they ran, and if anything went sideways that I didn’t account for, I could be on it like a fat kid with a candy bar.
That level of care and precision isn’t something that most people can even wrap their head around.
Meanwhile if your creative works are aided by AI, it’s just expression that’s affected, and for the most part, nobody even knows the difference, if you use AI to write emails, a lot of what’s being said, no big deal. It’s mostly filler text anyways. I’ve known a lot of people who write many words but say nothing with those words.
But if you screw up your taxes, well, the IRS is going to fuck your whole life up. Would you trust a fucking LLM with defending a court case where you’re accused of murder, and you’re facing life in prison? Probably not. Shit that needs to be done correctly the first time, will not be done by AI for a very, very long time. Taxes, legal work, and yes, even my job, won’t be done by AI anytime soon because bluntly, it has no idea what the fuck it’s doing.
well that’s sort of the point of this comic because the one thing you’d really want it to be good enough to do and would love to be able to trust something to do for you is the tax and all the other tasks in the comics are things you were pretty well able to do yourself before, probably wanted to do before, and if not exactly wanted, at least didn’t want something else to displace you in by taking over doing that task from now onwards especially if it was your actual job before. If displacing human workers for those tasks was the only problem, it’d be a sad but familiar story of progress but the fact that AI, at least for now is incapable of doing the part we’d all really love to have done for us is just the diarrhea icing on the dog turd cake.
You make fair points.