Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

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Humans have a right to know whether they are talking to a human or a machine. Even the benign example of restaurant hours -- maybe the guy was willing to tell the restaurants holiday hours to someone who is wondering, but DOES NOT want it posted to Google bringing in more customers and forcing him to stay longer on the holidays. I don't know, it's a contrived example but it's not the right approach to say "why should they have a problem?". The right approach is just to tell them and let them decide whether they have a problem with it or not. Anyway this is kind of a moot argument because Google has said that they will tell people the call is coming from Duplex, so Google itself has conceded that people have the right to know they are talking to a machine. It is somewhat unfortunate that people care about this from a software perspective though, because it probably is beneficial from a "learning" standpoint to have people just speaking as they would to a real human.

You can't just declare that humans have a right to know if they are talking to another human or a machine. That's just restating what you already said. You have to justify why humans should have that right.

We don't really have any "rights" at all, a right is just a concept that refers to the expectations humans have of each other and what is and is not okay to do. For example you may have a right to life to but you could still be murdered. Conceptually your rights have always been more than just what the law currently says. The US Declaration of Independence famously declared that all men are simply born with certain inalienable rights. That's just one way of looking at things, but it's an idea that kind of caught on.

Nobody declares our rights, we feel them in our guts. And the public feels this one in their gut without me having to explain it, which is why I call it a right: If something is generally accepted by the public, it is a de facto right. For example you could repeal the 1st amendment tomorrow but that wouldn't change anyones mind about whether freedom of speech is their right. But if you want me to stop being pedantic and actually defend my position, I would argue that people should have this right so that spammy AIs don't just ruin human interaction all together. Imagine a world where you never know if you're talking to a real person or some kind of AI trying to sell you something subtly... Not knowing explicitly whether you're talking to an AI or a real human could have a chilling effect on human-to-human relations.

It shifts the balance. Even if my hotline gets bombarded by mechanical turks the costs are the same on both sides.

Now google duplex can go and phone up every businessowner asking for the current store hours (or whatever), thus dumping the work of updating google's information on the store owners at essentially no own cost.

And the store owner does not even have a chance to find out whether it is a customer that will in some probability show up, or if he's just being used.

Isn't that the turing test? I'm excited about the potential of passing it in my lifetime.

Yeah, that would certainly be exciting but we're a long way off from that. The Google Duplex stuff we saw only covered a very narrow domain (taking reservations, etc). And that's not even released yet, and there's no telling when it really will be ready. Nobody even really knows how you would structure an artificial general intelligence at this point... last I heard.

I'm not. When that happens it means many of us (basically everybody between a keyboard and a chair) are out of a job.

'Dear turing test candidate, how would a program to do this and that look like.'

Or 'business strategy'.

It's the start of a post scarcity society. I'll take the not having to work and having a cure for every disease route of history, even if it's bumpy.

There are real threats to the transition though. My honest fear is that the people who discover it make themselves immortal gods and subjugate or kill everyone else.

IHMO post-scarcity could have started long ago. The problem will be that the people out of a jobs can't think of something new to do, at least not as fast as the machines (or the people with the machines).

Subjugation already happens. When it's easier to keep the population poor and just raid the natural ressources of a country, that's the way it often goes.

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