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Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

> The obsession is because we are going to anthromorphise it, and then we're going to put it in charge of important things in our lives

and that is the risk, its not the AI that's the problem, its people so removed from the tech that they fail to RTFM. Even the GPT4 release is extremely clear that its poor in high-stakes environments and its up to the tech community to educate ALL the casuals (best we can) so some idiot executive don't put it in full charge of mortgage underwriting or something.

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> its people so removed from the tech that they fail to RTFM

I find it highly amusing to think anything resembling an average user of tech has actually RTFM.

Heck, I still haven't finished the manual on Firefox and here I am using it as my daily driver. And it has people who actually understand how it all works writing the "manual".

EDIT: How many landlords have read the instructions on how RealPage's rent pricing software works, and how it sets values? 10%? Less?

Does firefox actually have a complete manual? One that accurately covers the behavior of every option in about:config. I'd love to be able to diff one file to see what things they've screwed with this time when I update.

Heck, MDN doesn’t even have full documentation for >10 year old tech Mozilla was tightly coupled to in the same time frame. Try discerning how to use XML-related features in a browser and you’ll very quickly find yourself trying to extrapolate from C/Java/even PHP stuff that might be tangentially related but probably isn’t, from increasingly less relevant websites. I couldn’t read the manual even though I tried.

well in this case the RTFM is just the paragraph on the release page that warns against using it in any high-risk scenario.

> people so removed from the tech that they fail to RTFM

Users in the current situation are presented with a big rainbow glowing button with a "FUTURE OF TECH" neon above it, and some small print memo tucked in the corner to explain why they shouldn't push the button.

Users should know better, for sure, but companies getting away with completely misleading names and grandiose statements regurgitated as is by the press should take 90% of the blame in my opinion.

I wish it was this simple, but looking through the last month of “show hn” posts makes it clear that the tech community can’t be trusted either. There are countless examples of authors promoting their latest toy (startup idea) to shoehorn chatgpt into a high stakes environment.

While I am enthusiastic about using these new tools properly and ethically (for instance creativity or helpful insights) I do worry that nothing has been learned of the dotcom craze, the NFT craze and name another bubble here.

It is my sincere hope to that people stop and wonder for a moment before the gold rush adrenaline starts pumping.

Won't happen. Money (aka survival) is too strong a motive. It's both instinctual and rational to ride the wave.

> its up to the tech community to educate ALL the casuals (best we can) so some idiot executive don't put it in full charge of mortgage underwriting or something

tech community are the idiots. Look at google autobanning based on AI

The inmates are running the asylum

Our almost 80-year-old leaders in the house & in the Senate & in the presidency are not well equipped to make good choices in this area. I'm not convinced professional computer scientists are really well equipped but at least we have potential to understand the scenario. But instead it's going to be people that think global warming doesn't exist because they brought a snowball into the Senate that make choices.

Strongly agree, we need mandatory retirement at 65 for elected office.

What are the benefits of this?

De facto term limits is a big benefit in itself, in my opinion. But also, we know that we haven’t solved the problems of aging, and old people as a class suffer from distinct cognitive problems. If it’s reasonable to ban people under 35, or under 21, from the presidency, it’s reasonable to ban people over 65 as well.

Thank you :)

ageist much?

I have occasionally been toying with the idea that the number of votes you have would be dependent on your expected lifetime left. The longer hou have to live with your electee's decisions the more say you should have.

A lot of problems with calculating that expected lifetime though: which variables can you include out of race, income, gender, job, recent purchase of a motorcycle, being diagnosed with cancer, etc?

In practice I think age buckets might be enough.

The people who put an AI in charge will have RTFM and fully understood it. They will do it anyway, as it will suit their own ends at the time.

> some idiot executive don't put it in full charge of mortgage underwriting

There are two scenario that you are mixing:

Mortgage writing using GPT make more money for the lender: I don't think it is a tech community responsibility to give wrong suggestion against GPT, and it should be handled in legal way.

GPT fails and mortgage and using GPT could mean loss for the lender: It would correctly push the market against relying on LLM, and I don't have any sympathy for those companies.

The issue is when the lender is too big to fail and get bailed out at the taxpayer's expense

In a current environment, mortgage underwriting can be done by a drumming bunny. Another bunny will bail them out.

Not a good example :-)

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