In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
A *human* assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. At some point, we'll need to stop treating computers as instruction executors and start treating them as autonomous agents. Non-determinism isn't a bug to be fixed, it's just the reality of working with this new kind of machines, and operators of those machines need to embrace that fact, like they did for human assistants.
So would you want a genius figuring out how to do everything you ask it to from scratch, or do you want to train someone how you want something done, so they do it the same way every time and you don’t have to explain yourself over and over?
Nondeterminism is actually a bug in many cases, and training, process and procedure, is how we mitigate it in humans.
You know what they call doing a task the same way every time? Micromanagement. Red tape. Waterfall design. In general, a bad thing. Kills creativity, slows everything down, minor setbacks become huge problems because there's no flexibility.
Defining every single step of every single task and making them perfectly repeatable works in an assembly line. But as an office assistant - and doubly so as a personal assistant - it creates inefficiency, makes dealing with edge cases very painful, and greatly increases maintenance burden of keeping all procedures up to date. Instead, giving people some leeway in how they approach their tasks and deliberately underspecifying processes to let them exercise their judgement is shown to work much better. Surely you had it covered in your training materials?
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
kevindamm · · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
ninjalanternshk · · focus · HN ↗
Nondeterminism is actually a bug in many cases, and training, process and procedure, is how we mitigate it in humans.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
Defining every single step of every single task and making them perfectly repeatable works in an assembly line. But as an office assistant - and doubly so as a personal assistant - it creates inefficiency, makes dealing with edge cases very painful, and greatly increases maintenance burden of keeping all procedures up to date. Instead, giving people some leeway in how they approach their tasks and deliberately underspecifying processes to let them exercise their judgement is shown to work much better. Surely you had it covered in your training materials?