This really gets at the heart of my instinctive dislike of how LLMs are being deployed. A core feature of computers, and tools in general, is reliability. I like software because you can set something up, run it, and (ideally) know that it will do the same job the same way each subsequent time you run it. I want a button that is clearly labeled, and when pressed, does a specific thing, acting like a limb, an extension of my will. I do not, in almost all cases, want my computer to be another distinct entity that I conduct social interactions with.

Maybe people got used to computers being unreliable and unpredictable as the UIs we shipped became more distracting, less learnable, always shifting and hiding information, popping up suggestions and displaying non-deterministic-seeming behavior. We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.

But as someone who's spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking and tuning his computing environment to prune out flakey components and fine-tune bindings and navigation, the idea of integrating a tool into my workflow that does amazing things but fails utterly even 1% of the time sounds like a nightmare, a sort of perpetual torture of low-grade anxiety.

> We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.

I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.