> we as a community have long touted ... that computers don’t make mistakes.

No community I know.

Otherwise, I agree.

> No community I know.

Everybody in sales in every software company in the world would be part of that community, I think. Some of the devs, too. Software was always marketed (and discussed with normal people) as something that could automate error-prone tasks, thereby eliminating the inevitable mistakes humans make when performing those tasks. Would Excel be the cornerstone of so many businesses if it sometimes gave the wrong value as a sum of a column?

That marketing (and the fact that, indeed, Excel can sum anything users throw at it without making mistakes) worked; now we have 3 generations of users who believe that once a computer "gets it" (ie. the correct software is installed and properly configured), it will perform a task given to it correctly forever. The fact that it's almost true (true in the absence of bugs and no changes to the setup, no updates, no hardware degradation, no space rays flipping important bits, etc.) doesn't help - that preceding parenthetical is hard to understand and often omitted when a developer talks to a non-developer.

We've always had software that wasn't as reliable as Excel - speech recognition and OCR come to mind. But in those cases, the errors are plainly visible - they cannot be "confidently wrong". Now we have LLMs that can be confidently wrong, and a vast number of users trained to think that software is either always right or, when it's wrong, it's immediately noticeable.

I don't think developers should bear the whole responsibility here - I think marketing had a much larger role in shaping users' minds. However, devs not clearly communicating the risks of bugs to users (for fear of scaring potential customers or out of laziness) over decades makes us partly responsible as well.