Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
How many AIs are there? What are the social consequences?
Tova:
This is a heck of a derail to attack/defend a story element that almost certainly got thrown in for the lulz because Jeph got annoyed at PDFs one day.
N.N. Marf:
Isn't ``Murphy'' not gendered?
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 29 Oct 2020, 00:43 ---I'd argue the risk of installing a pdf-reader on an office machine is trivial. As do most organisations.
--- End quote ---
Sure, maybe they do.. they shouldn't---I don't. Yes---on some systems---it's trivial to add all sorts of programmes, but the question is about safety: not trivial. There's a whole lot that a computer programme can do. The fact that it can display PDF documents properly, doesn't mean it doesn't do something else, too. Someone who's not savvy might find that difficult to discern. And---already mentioned---the programme might have errors, the errors might damage, the errors might be used by a malefactor to damage,, OK, sure, on some systems, there's good protections against bad programmes, but they make the systems more expensive: it's cheaper to occasionally incur the slight cost of digging out the machine that can do that, than constantly watching for the safe operation of all---even if that's only two---machines. To be clear, I'm not really talking about PDFs---that's just the example we're using right now, and the example is in the context of Questionable Content---the general case is, needing to do some rare task that the proven systems can't do.
pwhodges:
No software of any consequence can be proved to be absolutely bug-free. In many cases the specification against which its correctness would be assessed is incomplete or inconsistent. So the use of software (in any version, old or new) is subject to risk assessment rather than a simple assessment of correctness.
Tova:
I recommend that you google “Turing halting problem.” You may find it informative.
TLDR: No, you can’t prove the correctness of all programs written in a Turing-complete language.
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: N.N. Marf on 29 Oct 2020, 18:16 ---I've recently been reading about a style of programming conducive to such lucidity: literate programming: the programmer becomes, first, documentarian---instructions, of course, being a necessary part thereof.
--- End quote ---
People have been working on this matter for over 50 years (a couple of centuries if you consider that Ada Lovelace was aware of the problem). Even I wrote an article about it in the computer press in the 1970s. It's easy to say it's possible - it is excruciatingly hard to get anywhere near achieving it, not least because the human mind is itself not sufficiently lucid!
Also, what Tova said.
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