A Quote from Belligerentbarbies

This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability.

The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin password. Nobody but a handful of people knew of the machine's existence, certainly not anyone in middle management and above.

This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086...

(I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

Brenda has been getting slower over the years -as we all have-, but soon the boss will learn that it was a small price to pay for knowing well how to keep such house of cards from collapsing.

I'm actually not that worried about this, because again I would classify this as a problem that already exists. There are already idiots in senior management who pass off bullshit and screw things up. There are natural mechanisms to cope with this, primarily in business reputation - if you're one of those idiots who does this people very quickly start just discounting what you're saying, they might not know how you're wrong, but they learn very quickly to discount what you're saying because they know you can't be trusted to self-check.

I'm not saying that this can't happen and it's not bad. Take a look at nudge theory - the UK government created an entire department and spent enormous amounts of time and money on what they thought was a free lunch - that they could just "nudge" people into doing the things they wanted. So rather than actually solving difficult problems the uk government embarked on decades of pseudo-intellectual self agrandizement. The entire basis of that decades long debacle was based on bullshit data and fake studies. We didn't need AI to fuck it up, we managed it perfectly well by ourselves.

At some point, a publicly-listed company will go bankrupt due to some catastrophic AI-induced fuck-up. This is a massive reputational risk for AI platforms, because ego-defensive behaviour guarantees that the people involved will make as much noise as they can about how it's all the AI's fault.