Perplexity AI search engine.

[Steeveedee]

"artificial" is enough to put me off. It's just a computer program that can search over a lot of data. That's faster than human search rates, is all, and in the end needs a human to interpret. I'm reminded of the old saying, "GIGO"- "Garbage In, Garbage Out". People relying on software should beware. New knowledge is possible, but it should be tempered with some (intelligent) human intervention. I wrote miles of lines of FORTRAN code back in the old days (like 30+ years ago). I worked on a defense program that used spinning satellites that had to be balanced. We updated the software and control system to do it more efficiently, and many people claimed that the thing would have a reduced amount of unbalance. Truth is, there was so much noise in the system that there was no improvement in the process except for the time it took. The process used to take six weeks for a number of reasons unrelated to the computer. We got it down to mere days, for a saving of some millions in schedule time, and spent about $55k doing it. All that software relies on an error-prone human programmer at its base. The computer/program has its own error foibles. I used to do error analysis as another part of my job, and we had to look at the output from programs to make sure that a batch program hadn't generated errors. Computers still screw up. Even all the brainiacs at Tesla can't make accident-proof software.