Simon Willison’s Weblog

Most classical engineering fields deal with probabilistic system components all of the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say that inability to deal with probabilistic components is disqualifying from many engineering endeavors.

Process engineers for example have to account for human error rates. On a given production line with humans in a loop, the operators will sometimes screw up. Designing systems to detect these errors (which are highly probabilistic!), mitigate them, and reduce the occurrence rates of such errors is a huge part of the job. [...]

Software engineering is unlike traditional engineering disciplines in that for most of its lifetime it's had the luxury of purely deterministic expectations. This is not true in nearly every other type of engineering.

— potatolicious, in a conversation about AI engineering