I Witnessed the Future of AI, and It's a Broken Toy
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I call this a “tech tease”. When it arrives, I’ll pay for it. Until then, pony up for the R&D or take out a real loan or raise from VCs.
For example, there is no shifter stalk - software will guess if you want to go forward or reverse.
Automatic lights/high beams and automatic wipers are really annoying. yes, it is helpful sometimes, but manual control can be key for good driving. Sometimes a good safe driver wants to flash their high beams, turn off their lights, or control the interval wiper speed. Nope.
There’s a slider on the screen to let you pick forward or backward. No need to let software guess if you don’t want to. High beam flashing is a button on the steering wheel. And wiper control can be mapped to one of the scroll wheels, if you want manual control.
There’s no real reason to turn off headlights in a quick manner, though. I don’t think that’s possible from the steering wheel… but using the screen to disable it while you’re parked seems not particularly onerous.
Controlling shifting, headlights, wipers from screen controls gets in the way of you being a good driver.
In my driving experience, I have required dedicated controls for these functions.
Ever get mud on windshield? wiper fluid squirt switch.
Over had to slow down or speed up wipers? interval switch.
Ever had to turn on headlights due to signs requiring them? headlight switch
ever had to turn off headlights to prevent blinding someone sitting inside a restaurant you're parking in front of?
Ever had to flash headlights during the day to signal oncoming cars? headlight switch on/off
flashing high beams is not necessarily what you want to do. might be something you don't want to do.
I figure the only reason hazard lights are a dedicated switch is because the law requires it. tesla puts the switch in stupid places though.
(I like tesla by the way, I just disagree with their direction/decisions when it comes to dedicated controls)
Turning off headlights while parked at a restaurant seems like the quintessential thing that could be stuck on a screen control. Not needed often, no urgency to use it.
And flashing high beams is if anything more important in the day than regular lights, since daytime headlights are harder to notice.
That’s pretty much what this ongoing trend towards releasing unfinished products is. It’s a way for companies to exploit customers even more and squeeze every last penny out of people. It’s probably worse than that too because it’s slowly shifting the norm and can result in every hype idea becoming a money grab.
Or perhaps "right" for us. Because everything that strengthens the connection with AI erodes the potential for human connection. Every time you ask an AI a question, you are less likely to embark upon the journey of self-discovery. If you get help from an AI, you are less likely to get help from a fellow human being, and you are less likely to HELP another human being.
How is that different from using a search enigne? Actually, not much, except that AI provides a few more pieces of the puzzle of a substitute for human connection, and brings that to the next level. It is an order of magnitude better that passive reading, and thus an order of magitude better in separating people.
When something like this succeeds, it will be another failure for humanity.
Literally scraping the largest accessible corpus of human communication and attempting to emulate it and placing it as a MITM attack between us.
We're building this over at https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt. OpenAdapt learns to automate tasks in desktop apps by observing human demonstrations.
Early demo: https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237 (more coming soon!)
The demo is overly simplistic to keep it short -- it also works with arbitrary applications and operations.
Also, we're open source. Contributions and feedback are welcome and encouraged :)
Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video] | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40206063
Why is that not just an app on your smartphone which already has superior hardware and everyone already carries?
As one of the comments said it might have made sense in an alternative universe in which smartphones were not invented.
The real problem is that tech produced by corporations, whose explicit goal is to minimize input labor/time/salaries and maximize revenue, does tend to slowly degenerate into repetitions of itself.
When software is treated as a handmade thing, it transcends its inherent value as a tool, it becomes an ornament, a sentimental object, a type of self-expression.
When you design software as a product, intent on copying your competitors exactly to satisfy the investors, even if that market niche is taken, software becomes boring.
You can build a culture out of trash, but it will only be a trash culture.
(in all seriousness, voice devices are a crucial affordance or adaptation for some disabled users. i ordered one of these (somewhat impulsively i admit) to evaluate it for a family member with a neurodegenerative disease who uses alexa to a degree that seems almost insane to me but it allows him to navigate his daily activities.)