Software works so much more than 99% of the time that it's a rather deliberate strawman to claim otherwise.

Newly-"AI"-branded things that I have touched work substantially less than 90% of the time. There are like 3 orders of magnitude difference, even people who aren't paying any attention at all are noticing it.

Do you have to write your code presuming that sometimes 'a + b' will be wrong? I don't.

Software pretty much always "works" when you consider the definition of work to be "does what the programmer told it too". AI? Not so much.

It’s all about limits and edge cases. a+b may “fail” at INT_MAX and at 0.1+0.2. You don’t `==` your doubles, you don’t (a+b)/2 your mid, and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as <…>”. You don’t care about determinism because it’s a statistical instrument.

> and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as <…>”.

That's exactly my point. You have to interact directly with the A.I. and be aware of what its doing.

That's not true. If software works correctly today then users can expect it to work correctly tomorrow. If it doesn't work any more that's a bug.

If twenty components work 99% of the time, then they only have an 0.99^20 = 82% chance of working as a collective.

If your 5.1 GHz (billion instructions per second) CPU had a 0.00000001% chance of failing at a given instruction, you'd have a 40% chance of a crash every second.

If a flight had a 1% chance of killing everyone aboard 10 million people/day * 1% = 100,000 people would die every day from a plane.

Gamblers fallacy