alt Hacker NewsPsychopharmacology is a great example of “doesn’t reliably work” as their products have serious and even disastrous side effects at times — including SSRIs triggering violent acts and suicides.
Again, my exact point is that mathematics loses its utility when you reduce it to that inaccurate usage. You no longer can have any faith in the conclusions — just like sometimes psychiatrists kill their patients with an SSRI prescription because they don’t understand the drugs.
> Would the high priestess of human reason pass her divining rod over such chips or life-saving drugs and reject it as the work of the AI devil?
My point is you can’t know if you’re turning it over for life saving drugs or poison, if you don’t understand what you’re getting.
This is true for any drug, any drug can presumably become a poison, can interact with some genetic or biological trait and trigger a side effect and so on. The complexity of the biological systems is so great that they defy clear deterministic understanding, but stochastic empiric knowledge and treatments still have immense value.
If you give me an inference chip that runs 200x faster, yes, it could be backdoored to take control of my dishwasher and kill me in my sleep - but I can't deny it runs 200x faster an account of nobody being able to explain why. The same for the mistery cancer drug that cured everyone who took it up to now, but could, without doubt, kill the next patient.