2026-10-06 18:58 UTC
Back in the 1980s Mr. Griffiths taught Computer Science in my local school. Two maxims he repeated almost every week have stuck with me for decades.
"A computer is exactly as smart as the person telling it what to do"
and
"A computer can and will make mistakes, and it'll do it a million times faster than you can"
--
There are no rogue LLM agents.
Only negligent people telling computers what to do.
And letting them make mistakes a million times faster than ever before.
Replies (1)
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@stuartl@mastodon.longlandclan.id.au 2026-10-06 20:17
@jaz@toot.wales In nearly every circumstance where a computer under my control has "made a mistake", a human-generated mistake has been the root cause. Often I see the source of that human-generated mistake looking at me in the mirror. In the rare instance that it's the machine, it's a hardware fault like a failing DRAM module. The teacher is right though when he says the computer will replicate that mistakes many times over. Computers are good at repetition, good and bad repetition alike.