Re:DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine
by jacquesm on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:59PM
(#50169331)
> "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
That's a great way of putting it. So far I always used 'you can outsource work but you can't outsource responsibility'.
Re:DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine
by airspresso on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:06PM
(#50171929)
> "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Legendary quote from an internal 1979 IBM training document [1]
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
The prerequisite here is that you can trust it not to do something that gives criminals access to your bank account or allows users to consume an unlimited amount of services it costs you money to provide for free or bankrupts you through legal liability etc.
It's basically this:
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Notice what this is actually saying. It's not saying that the computer can't generate a given output. It's saying that if the computer makes a mistake and you don't bother to check, you're the one who has to eat it.