Comment by hm-nah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hm-nah | Hacker News Reader

This is a wild concept to wrestle with. Questions that arise…

- What are the ramifications of a child interacting with the voice of their dad, through a computer interface?

- What happens if the child interacts MORE with robodad than with actualdad?

- How does the child attribute the things they’ve “learned” from their now, robo, dad?

- Is this an offshoot of how the TV was the new babysitter in the decades after it came out? “Go ask robodad”.

- What happens when the child reconciles what robodad says with what actual dad says? “But robodad says…”.

- How will the child remember which “dad” shared which “wonderful piece of advice”? This is treading on shaky ground to me. At a time where many families in the western world (everywhere?) are dealing with digital distractions, social media mental disease, and general lack of cohesion… and now MITM AI between a parent and a child… whooo… idk.

- How will actualdad feel in 1year, 2years, 5years of this “tool” “augmenting” his parenting?

- How will actualmom feel about the child interacting with this thing? How could this make her feel?

Pretty crazy how this poster anthropomorphized AI and placed it directly between one of the most sacred communication paths.

How many dads are going take this project as a “todo” and follow suite?

I hope others are thinking about these questions and I’m not being a wet blanket.

(OP here). In practice my stress level about this (for me and my family) is about zero. Eight year olds are quite smart; he knows exactly what is going on here and finds it entertaining. Real dad’s presence isn’t going anywhere. It’s largely a fun gimmick and treated as such. And if it started getting weird, I’d just turn it off.

Now, as the tech improves I think this line of thinking is going to be a legitimate concern - I don’t think you are being a wet blanket. But at its current level, it’s pretty transparently a half-baked computer program, and treated as such by my kid.

> Eight year olds are quite smart; he knows exactly what is going on here and finds it entertaining.

I'm betting there's more to this, subconsciously, than we know.

We instinctively ascribe agency to objects that move in a non-inertial frame. We anthropomorphize both living and non-living things. I suspect there are deep subconscious instincts being "tickled" by this application of technology. Giving it the voice of a parent is probably touching some adjacent instincts relating to parental recognition, too.

Aside: Have you talked to him about how an LLM is chaining words together through a statistical model versus actually "thinking" and understanding what it's "saying"? I recently walked my 10 y/o daughter thru a simple Markov model text generator example to give her a very basic understanding of how computers and be programmed and trained to give output that appears to be generated by a thinking process.

My sense is that lay-people believe that these LLMs really are "thinking" and I wanted to provide her with some inoculation against that perception when she inevitably runs into it.

My sense is that lay-people believe the LLMs are essentially googling things in the background. The idea that they are not connected to the internet is unfathomable.

Is being connected to a digested snapshot of the internet really that different from being connected to the actual internet?

I'd argue that they are connected to the internet in a meaningful sense

At least the digested version of the internet doesn't flake out, give 404s, and ask for permission to put cookies on your browser.

My sense is that lay-people believe that these LLMs really are "thinking"

The way the comment rhetoric is on hacker news around LLMs, it seems some technical people believe that LLMs really are "thinking" too.

> But at its current level, it’s pretty transparently a half-baked computer program…

Or it could be transparently trans-parenting. First time in human evolution we have had an on-call, near-real-time, interactive evocation of a loved one.

trans prefix 4 : so or such as to change or transfer

transliterate translocation transamination transship

> I hope others are thinking about these questions and I’m not being a wet blanket.

I wasn't, specifically. But they feel like specialisations or subclasses of the general unease I feel about a lot of our contemporary tech.

As an example: I've grown to hate most social tech, mainly because of the tracking. But the mental image I used to get me off it was to imagine Zuck sitting in on all my conversations, silently taking notes. You wouldn't tolerate that, even if it wasn't Zuck. And yet we do.

Many of us are willing to remove the human connection, the effort to learn, the struggle to express from our day to day lives. It's the learning and struggle that gives extra value to the encounters we have and the situations we make. To me, using a lot of this technology feels like giving away something of what makes life worth living. (I understand the convenience; I get that "it's just a tool", I use tools all the time, I'm willing to engage with this new stuff to learn more about it, but slowly).

The worst is that we're giving that effort, that learning, that struggle (and its impact on us) to unaccountable entities which can bypass the social contracts we would normally make with one another, and which can scale up profit from that donation, thereby also devaluing our own labours and experiences to enrich a small few. Open source mitigates some of that, but most users would still be giving up their own embodiment of their creative acts.

The note-taking analogy isn’t exactly bad or wrong, but… maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t see where the incentives are to do anything with all these notes on our behavior beyond just mining it for possible marketing opportunities, which has just never bothered me. There are certainly classes of individuals, such as spies, very important journalists, celebrities, etc. who it might be worth it to tap into the raw data illicitly before it is purged, anonymized, summarized into oblivion. But that is true of things like the telephone network as well: it’s a data stream which is not guaranteed to be fully secure (cops can wiretap, or a crooked engineer at the phone company could gain access to listen in too). But those risks don’t seem to materialize in a way that matters to most people. So I’m as bothered by it as I am having a conversation in a restaurant: I wouldn’t yell out my SSN but overall I am pretty confident nobody cares about what I’m saying besides my intended listener.

Most people will be neither murdered nor know anyone who was - and yet we still have laws to prevent such things.

Are you not bothered by such crimes because they won't be likely to happen to you or most normal people?

> we're giving that effort, that learning, that struggle (and its impact on us) to unaccountable entities

Boy did this ring true. We're engaging with parties that are able to exhibit an immense amount of power over our lives, and have NO skin in our game: we'll be the ones left cleaning up the pieces after their party is over.

> Is this an offshoot of how the TV was the new babysitter in the decades after it came out? “Go ask robodad”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCPhbN1l024

> "If only I programmed the robot to be more careful of what I wish for!"

“Robot, experience this tragic irony for me.”

This is pretty much the basis of the plot of M3GAN (though it later takes it in a horror direction) - quite recommended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3GAN

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