Author makes some good points about designing human computer interfaces, but has a very opinionated view of how AI can be used in systems engineering tooling which seems like it misses a lot of places where AI can be useful even without humans in the loop?

▲

swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent [-]

The scenarios in the article are all about mission-critical disaster recovery - we don't even trust the majority of our human colleagues with those scenarios! AI won't make inroads there without humans in the loop, until AI is 100% trustworthy.

▲

tptacek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right, so: having an agent go drop index segments from a search cluster to resolve a volume utilization problem is a bad idea, rather than just suggesting "these old index segments are using up 70% of the storage on this volume and your emergency search cluster outage would be resolved if you dropped them, here's how you'd do that".

But there are plenty of active investigative steps you'd want to take in generating hypotheses for an outage. Weakly's piece strongly suggests AI tools not take these actions, but rather suggest them to operators. This is a waste of time, and time is the currency of incident resolution.

▲

datadrivenangel 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the author assumes that these humans are going to be very rigorous, which is good for SRE teams, but even then not consistently.

	▲	agentultra 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We don't need humans to be perfect to have reliable responses to critical situations. Systems are more important than individuals at that level. We understand people make mistakes and design systems and processes to compensate. The problem with unattended AI in these situations is precisely the lack of context, awareness, intuition, intention, and communication skills. If you want automation in your disaster recovery system you want something that fails reliably and immediately. Non-determinism is not part of a good plan. Maybe it will recover from the issue or maybe it will delete the production database and beg for forgiveness later isn't what you want to lean on. Humans have deleted databases before and will again, I'm sure. And we have backups in place if that happens. And if you don't then you should fix that. But we should also fix the part of the system that allows a human to accidentally delete a database. But an AI could do that too! No. It's not a person. It's an algorithm with lots of data that can do neat things but until we can make sure it does one particular thing deterministically there's no point in using it for critical systems. It's dangerous. You don't want a human operator coming into a fire and the AI system having already made the fire worse for you... and then having to respond to that mess on top of everything else.

▲

topaz0 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or it will, and disaster will ensue.