Same with the black box part of AI. What the weights represent? Arcane dark magic if you ask me. What do they do? Well with LLMs we're all experiencing it.
How do we know the person getting anesthesia doesn't die and a new soul/consciousness replaces them?
(We can ask the same question about going to sleep, er even walking through a door, but it's still something to think about).
Recall also that LLMs are not actually entities. In their current form, there is no sentience, there is no agency. They are tools. Therefore, their output must benefit the user that requested it. Right now, that's humans (and, ideally, the planet at large; we don't exist in a vacuum) and so it makes sense that humans should verify that output and try to ensure that it aligns with their goals.
That's not to say that the output of an LLM is useless, far from it. But we should still *try* to understand its output. It gives us at least some chance to notice flaws, and an even greater chance to appreciate the implications and tradeoffs of the solution it picked.
But extra lives saved definitely counts for a whole lot and is definitely useful.
One comparison I see: there are so many religious people that simply wish they are saved from their cancer (or whatever else). They pray for it. They don’t care how it happens. They simply want to live longer, etc.
It’s a sketch of an argument, I hope you know what I am getting at.