Real life indirection is the root of all evil, and AI agents can fix it | Hacker News Reader

Real life indirection is the root of all evil, and AI agents can fix it

marianogappa.github.io

30 pointsmaloga15 comments

The article has a variety of things wrong, such as the school system in Finland. Like most places, there are national curriculum standards. But not only does that not make all schools equally effective, private schools are still possible, including ones not specifically approved by the government. In those instances the local municipality monitors progress and issues certificates. The schools cannot be for-profit but then most private schools in the US are also operated as non-profits. In short, the idea that a wealthy person can’t buy a better education for their children and is thereby incentivized to ensure the public schools are excellent, that is not true. If you’re looking for a reason why Finland has excellent schools, it’s not “Rich people have no other choice”.

https://www.aacrao.org/edge/emergent-news/private-education-...

One area where AI agents can help, is in going to the supermarket! many times what look like competing brands, are all owned by the same people, like Kellogg's or Procter & Gamble. they just create different packaging to appeal to different people. branding is just obfuscation. it'd be great to have the veil taken off, and every time you look at a product it shows you how the marketing team who made it, placed it in the market, should be cheaper than this other product but more expensive than something else, and so they created a new image in order for it to find a place in the market. market. But underneath the colorful ink, it's all the same crap

This human intelligent agent specializes in that, quite impressively, and has 897k followers. Not a bad start on a movement.

Why do we need an AI agent for this?

> One area where AI agents can help, is in going to the supermarket!

No need for AI there - there already are apps that you can use to scan the barcodes of products to filter for Nestle [1].

> But underneath the colorful ink, it's all the same crap

Not exactly. There are definitely differences between brand-name products and whitelabel ones... in food, for example, substituting actual sugar for cheaper HFCS, or industrial farming produce and meat as ingredients instead of certified-organic ones free from pesticides, or different ratios between "valuable" ingredients (meat) vs filler (grain), or legit aroma/flavour instead of synthetic. In non-food, product quality (plastic parts vs metal), repairability or stuff like warranty / support / security update availability.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buycott.an...

Does any of that matter if the consumer consistently chooses the cheapest product? If the shopper chooses the soap with lowest price per gram, what does it matter what brand it is or who owns what brands? An AI assistant might be much faster and directly relevant to the consumer by finding the best deal than investigating the irrelevant history of brands and marketing and shell corporations.

You realize that AI agents will push the most malicious, unhealthy, sponsored, Nestle and Kellogs shit to you? You realize what's happened to the internet, and SEO spam, and social media, and you think AI will be a force for good, informed consumerism? Or do you think it will be controlled by whoever has the biggest ad spend budgets?

AI agents would just cause another layer of indirection (who funds, designs and builds them?, who runs them?, who understands their black box innards? who is empowered to act on their output etc.)

The depressing truth is that we already have more than enough information technology to steer society towards "a better place" if we wanted to. The same exact collections of sensors, chips, devices, cables, OS's, algorithms, databases, apps etc can be deployed in countless other configurations to establish ground truth, educate and inform, empower and enrich. Make us wiser rather than dumber.

Why is it not happening? The actual "software" run by society is both far more primitive and far more sticky than what idealistic techies give it credit for. A positive breakthrough after all the negative steps may yet come. History has not stopped. It may have accelerated as of late. But its an unpredictable and convoluted process.

Talk about lacking self-awareness. The author lists "cancel culture" as a good thing and says that they don't care about false positives. Almost like they're distanced from the consequences....

This reads like the author has just taken their first intro to political philosophy class.

The art documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) (available on YouTube...) is basically about how the distant separation of employees from the consequences of their decisions naturally leads nice, regular people to behave effectively like psychopaths and not realize it. Highly recommended.

You can’t write that “indirection” is the “root of all evil” and then in the conclusion claim that capitalism and tings like the nation state are one of our greatest inventions. But the fact that they chose a programming concept as their metaphor tells me enough about this wide-sweeping narrative.

Great inventions can be used in good or bad ways.

What does the metaphor tell you? And are you sure it's only the metaphor doing the "telling"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

> Great inventions can be used in good or bad ways.

Plainly and obviously wrong if you look at the context.

> > I believe that some of our mightiest inventions have served the purpose of enhancing our ability to collaborate as a civilization:

> What does the metaphor tell you? And are you sure it's only the metaphor doing the "telling"?

Wow you got me.

> Plainly and obviously wrong if you look at the context.

"Obviously" wrong - what's this? A human that agrees with their own opinion?

> Wow you got me.

I wonder: do you understand what I'm referring to?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com