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 But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps.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.
And we started adding rules for the humans to follow, until we have complex bureaucracy. We invented tons of formal notations systems and error detecting and correction mechanisms. We invented deterministic machines. All because we are deeply unsatisfied with the non-determinism! Because it means you can never trust some process, optimize it away and stop thinking about it. You always need to check, and there is always something missing.
A lot of our manufacturing ability improvement during the last 200 years, as well as our engineering ability improvement during the last 500 years, is not just the raw power we unlocked, but that we made it deterministic, reliable and reproducible and hence automatable and automatic.
There's a reason bureaucracy has negative connotations. Also, notice how we still ended up with a system where everybody in the bureaucracy has a lot of leeway in what decisions they make.
Can you build a new hospital? Up to the local government to decide. How much is your property tax? Only a tax assessor can tell you. Which trees get trimmed and which are left intact? Decided on case by case basis with no strict rules. Which convenience stores are getting audited for tax and food safety compliance this week? There's a middle rank officer who makes that decision every week, my mum used to be one. How high is the bail set in criminal proceedings? Judges are famously very inconsistent on that and it's a good thing. In countries without constitutional gun rights, it's common that the final step in the process of obtaining gun permit is some government employee having a good gut feeling about you, and if they get bad feeling you get denied. And so on and so forth everywhere you look.
Manufacturing is a different beast entirely. I'm not saying we should put Siri and Cortana in charge of bolting down Boeing fuselage. But for most office and bureaucratic tasks, demanding perfect determinism is not only unnecessary but actively harmful.
That's not caused by bureaucracy itself, but by the rules given. You can have the same with non-rule-based systems, except then you don't even know which rule is the fault, and neither fix it nor complain. That's absolutism and corruption. Bureaucracy is a huge improvement.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
kevindamm · · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
1718627440 · · focus · HN ↗
A lot of our manufacturing ability improvement during the last 200 years, as well as our engineering ability improvement during the last 500 years, is not just the raw power we unlocked, but that we made it deterministic, reliable and reproducible and hence automatable and automatic.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
Can you build a new hospital? Up to the local government to decide. How much is your property tax? Only a tax assessor can tell you. Which trees get trimmed and which are left intact? Decided on case by case basis with no strict rules. Which convenience stores are getting audited for tax and food safety compliance this week? There's a middle rank officer who makes that decision every week, my mum used to be one. How high is the bail set in criminal proceedings? Judges are famously very inconsistent on that and it's a good thing. In countries without constitutional gun rights, it's common that the final step in the process of obtaining gun permit is some government employee having a good gut feeling about you, and if they get bad feeling you get denied. And so on and so forth everywhere you look.
Manufacturing is a different beast entirely. I'm not saying we should put Siri and Cortana in charge of bolting down Boeing fuselage. But for most office and bureaucratic tasks, demanding perfect determinism is not only unnecessary but actively harmful.
1718627440 · · focus · HN ↗