You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years.

Examples:

- Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the decisions were correct.

- Autopilot: planes can now land themselves to an accuracy that is so precise that the front landing gear wheels "thud" as they go over the runway center markers.

and this has been true for at least 10 years.

In other words, if the above is possible then we are not far off from some kind of "expert system" that runs a business unit (which may be all robots or a mix of robots and people).

A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

EDIT: fixed some typos/left out words

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mjr00 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

This is a piece of science fiction and has its own (inaccurate, IMO) view on how minimum wage McDonald's employees would react to a robot manager. Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.

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pixl97 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.

Why, it's as much of a view of our past adherence to technology without thinking as a well as a view of the future.

"Computer says no" is a saying for a reason.

	▲	nirav72 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>"Computer says no" is a saying for a reason. Current LLMs rarely or seldom say no. Unless, they're specifically configured to block out certain types of requests.

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pavel_lishin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But none of those things are AI in the same sense that we use the term now, to refer to LLMs.

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alexpotato 5 hours ago | parent [-]

But those things were considered on the same level of current LLMs in the sense of "well, a computer might do part of my job but not ALL of it".

No, algorithmic trading didn't replace everything a trader did but it most certainly replaced large parts of the workload and made it much faster and horizontally scalable.

	▲	exsomet 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The two key differences to me are infrastructure and specificity of purpose. Autoland in plane requires a set of expensive, complex, and highly fine-tuned equipment to be installed on every runway in the world that enables it (which as a proportion is statistically not a majority of them). And as to specificity, this system does exactly one thing - land a specific model of plane on a specific runway equipped with instrumentation configured a specific way. The point being: it isn’t a magic wand. Any serious conversation of AI in these types of life or death situations has to recognize that without the corresponding investment in infrastructure and specificity of purpose, things like this blog post are essentially just science fiction. The fact that previous generations of technology considered autoland and algorithmic trading to be magic doesn’t really change anything about that.

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djwide 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm saying there's something structurally different form autonomous systems generally and from an LLM corpus which has all of the information in one place and at least in theory extractable by one user.

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kekqqq 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I must say that the book is unrealistic, but it makes a good sci-fi story. Thanks, I read it just now in 80 min.