Ordered approximately by recency:
Banking? Clocks? Roman aqueducts? Mayan calendars? The sun rising every day? Predictable rainy and dry season?
How is software the outlier here?
People on HN regularly claim that LLMs are useless if they aren’t 100% accurate all the time. I don’t think this is true. We work around that kind of thing every day.
With your examples:
- Before computers, fraud and human error was common in the banking system. We designed a system that was resilient against this and mostly worked, most of the time, well enough for most purposes even though it was built on an imperfect foundation.
- Highly precise clocks are a recent invention. For regular people 200 years ago, one person’s clock would often be 5-10 minutes off from someone else’s. People managed to get things done anyway.
I’ll grant you that Roman aqueducts, seasons and the sun are much more reliable than computers (as are all the laws of nature).
This is surely the greatest weakness of current LLMs for any task needing a spark of creativity.