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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

TBH, I think the IT industry is too concentrated at eating itself. We are happily automating our jobs away and such while the other industries basically just sleep through.

I don't want generative AI in my phone. I want someone, or something to book a meeting with my family doctor, the head of my son's future primary school, etc. I don't need AI to do that. I need the other industries (medical/government/education) to wake up and let us automate them.

Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls? Like in the 1970s I guess? Do you know it takes hours to reach a government office, and they work maybe 6 hours a day? The whole world is f**ing sleeping, IT people, hey guys, slow down on killing yourselves.

AI is supposed to get rid of the chores, now it leaves us with the chores and take the creative part away. I don't need such AI.

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I wonder if Apple ever approached Google about using Gemini as the flagship integration. I say that because during the keynote I kept thinking to myself, this could be the moment that Google realises it needs to stick to what it knows best - Search - and all they have to do is sit back and watch the hype fade away.

But that’s in a perfect world.

Even to this day, post ChatGPT, I still can’t imagine how I would ever use this AI stuff in a way that really makes me want to use it. Maybe I am too simple of a mind?

Maybe the problem is in the way that it is presented. Too much all at once, with too many areas of where and how it can be used. Rewriting emails or changing invitations to be “poems” instead of text is exactly the type of cringe that companies want to push but it’s really just smoke and mirrors.

Companies telling you to use features that you wouldn’t otherwise need. If you look at the email that Apple rewrote in the keynote - the rewritten version was immediately distinguishable as robotic AI slop.

My understanding is that Apple's approach to this integration is adaptable; much like how you would change your browser's search engine, you'll be able to change which external AI model is utilized. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.

I don't think the choice of integration really matters for GP's point. Regardless of which model is used, how useful is the ability to rewrite an email in AI Voice really going to be? If I'm struggling over how to word an email there's usually a specific reason for it; maybe I'm trying to word things for a very particular audience or trying to find a concise way to cover something complicated that I have a lot of knowledge of. General purpose language model output wouldn't help at all in those cases.

I'm sure there are usecases for this and the other GenAI features, but they seem more like mildly useful novelties than anything revolutionary.

There's risk to this as well. Making it easier to produce low value slop will probably lead to more of it and could actually make communication worse overall.

TBF I was too harsh in my original comment. I did use ChatGPT to automate away the chore part of the coding (boiler plate for example). But I have a gut feeling that in maybe 5-10 years this is going to replace some junior programmer's job.

My job can be largely "AIed" away if such AI gets better and the company feeds internal code to it.

> My job can be largely "AIed" away if such AI gets better and the company feeds internal code to it.

The first company to offer their models for offline use, preferably delivered in shipping container you plug in, with the ability to "fine tune" (or whatever tech) with all their internal stuffs, wins the money of everyone that has security/confidentiality requirements.

Unless the company handles national security, the existing cloud tos and infrastructure fulfill all the legal and practical requirements. Even banks and hospitals use cloud now.

The context here is running third party LLM, not running arbitrary things in the cloud.

> the existing cloud tos and infrastructure fulfill all the legal and practical requirements

No, because the practical requirements are set by the users, not the TOS. Some companies, for the practical purposes of confidentiality and security, DO NOT want their information on third party servers [1].

Top third party LLM are usually behind an API, with things like retention, in those third party servers, for content policy/legal reasons. On premise, while being able to maintain content policy/legal retention on premise, for any needed retrospection (say after some violation threshold), will allow a bunch of $$$ to use their services.

[1] Companies That Have Banned ChatGPT: https://jaxon.ai/list-of-companies-that-have-banned-chatgpt/

edit: whelp, or go this route, and treat the cloud as completely hostile (which it should be, of course): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639606

If it can automate a junior away it seems as likely it will just make that junior more capable.

Somebody still needs to make those decisions that it can't make well. And some of those decisions doesn't require seniority.

That’s not what happens.

What happens is if you don’t need junior people, you eliminate the junior people, and just leave the senior people. The senior people then age out, and now you have no senior people either, because you eliminated all the junior people that would normally replace them.

This is exactly what has happened in traditional manufacturing.

> this could be the moment that Google realises it needs to stick to what it knows best - Search

In my mind Google is now a second class search like Bing. Kagi has savagely pwned Google.

> this could be the moment that Google realises it needs to stick to what it knows best - Search

You misspelled "ads"

> AI is supposed to get rid of the chores, now it leaves us with the chores and take the creative part away. I don't need such AI.

You know I hadn't considered that and I think that's very insightful. Thank you

This quote has been circulating recently:

> I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes

Seems kind of silly. Laundry machines and dishwashers exist. The issue with the last mile is more robotics and control engineering than strictly AI. It's getting annoying seeing AI used as an umbrella term for everything related to automation.

That’s not possible yet, moving atoms is much more difficult than moving bits.

I feel like you've hit this industry in the nose without realizing it. How much actual value is the tech industry producing?

Absolutely, doing easier things at massive scale can still have more value than harder things at small scale.

I actually think exactly what should happen is already happening. All the low hanging fruit from software should be completed over the next decades, then the industry will undergo massive consolidation and there will be a large number of skilled people not needed in the industry anymore and they can move onto the next set of low hanging hard(er) problems for humanity.

Given that almost every major thing in the world runs on some kinds of computers running some software - a lot, probably. The fact that we don't have perfect and infallible robots and universal ways to manipulate the unpredictable, chaotic environment that is the real world (see also - self-driving cars) simply doesn't affect a lot of industries.

Bits will move bots, and hopefully do laundry and dishes too.

As for government - depends on a country. In Poland we have an mCitizen (mObywatel) mobile app that allows to handle more things tear by year, and we have internet sites with unified citizen login for most of the other government interactions.

The last time our IRS wanted sth from me, they just e-mailed me, I replied and the issue was solved in 5 minutes.

Oh, and you don’t need any paper ids within the country - driver license, car registration and official citizen id are apps on your phone, and if you don’t have your phone when say police catches you, you give them your data and they check it with their database and with your photo to confirm.

Sounds similar to what the Ukrainian government did with the Diya app (lit. "Act/Action" but also an abbreviation of "the country and me") a few years ago. It's an interesting trend to see Eastern Europe adopt this deep level of internet integration before the countries that pioneered that same internet.

> The last time our IRS wanted sth from me, they just e-mailed me, I replied and the issue was solved in 5 minutes.

Lol, that will never happen in the USA. We have companies like Intuit actively lobbying against making things easy because their entire business is claiming to deal with the complexity for you.

Yeah. Another cool thing is that we have government tax forms that are web/mobile, and it takes like 2 min and 8 clicks to fill them - including login. (for private people)

You don't have to walk to the local government office to get car registration plates anymore? That was always annoying as hell.

That’s one of the remaining bastions, sadly. The pickup I can understand, but the need for signup is weird.

On the upside, they are removing the requirements to change plates when you buy a used car, so there’s that.

In Sweden doctors have a fair bit of automation/systems around them, the sad part is that much of it has been co-opted for more stringent records keeping,etc that's just making doctors unhappy and ballooning administration costs instead of focusing on bringing better care for patients.

In essense, we've saved 50 lives a year by avoiding certain mistakes with better record keeping and killed 5000 since the medical queues are too long due to busy doctors so people don't bother getting help in time.

I have a faint to noticable but persistent back pain. It should be checked out but I do not want to cause bigger pain and mental strain than caused by the back pain by talking to 3-4 persons sending me around and putting me in phone queues weeks apart just to see a doctor sometime in the future - with my embarrassingly low priority issue - making mountains of paperworks bored having too little time to diagnose me (that have the risk of leading to even bigger pile of paperwork). It's a different country, life is all the same.

I completely agree, especially with the taking away the creative part and leaving us with the chores.

Doctors have exams, residencies, and limited licenses to give out to protect their industry. Meanwhile, tech companies will give an engineering job to someone who took a 4 month bootcamp.

I share your frustration on services that won’t let you automate them, but to me that’s precisely what generative AI will let you do. You don’t need an API at the family doctors to have AI automate it for you. It just rings them up and sorts it out at your command. AI is like obtaining an API to anything

AI is skipping software integrations the same way cell phone towers (and Starlink) skipped phone wire deployment.

> Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls?

And despite that it's still your family doctor.

I fully agree with your vision. It's obvious once laid out in words and it was a very insightful comment. But the incentives are not there for other industries to automate themselves.

I like a family doctor who only takes calls. Good doctors are responsive or have responsive staff. One time a doctor was locked into booking and communicating via this One Medical app that's a total piece of shit and just made things harder, so I went elsewhere. If someone makes a truly better solution, AI or not, doctors will use it without being forced.

And government offices don't even care to begin with, you have no other choice.

> I don't want generative AI in my phone. I want someone, or something to book a meeting with my family doctor, the head of my son's future primary school, etc. I don't need AI to do that.

If someone can do that more productively with Gen AI, do you care?

> Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls? ... Do you know it takes hours to reach a government office, and they work maybe 6 hours a day?

Google has a few different features to handle making calls on your behalf and navigating phone menus and holds.

I’ve had some success with google assistant calling restaurants to make reservations, when they are phone only. I expect it’s a matter of time until they can camp on my doctors office. Or call my insurance and pretend to be me.

>some success with google assistant calling

The funny thing is, these auto-callers don't even need to be successful. They just need to become common enough for restaurants and doctors to get annoyed to the point where they finally bring their processes to the 21st century.

I know this wasn’t really your point, but most physicians around me use Epic MyChart, so I can book all that online. I also almost exclusively use email to communicate with our school district, and we’re in a small town.

Social problems are the hard ones, information problems are the easy ones. So the latter are the low-hanging fruit that gets solved first

Ohhhh yes. That's why I was so hyped about Google Duplex or duo?! Never heard of it again....

It's available today, it's just not a product called "Duplex". Android has call screening and "hold my call" and phone menu tree detection. On select Google Maps listings, you can make reservations by clicking a button which will make a phone call in the background to make a reservation.

Great points!

The only thing I'd add: I don't think the responsibility for lack of automation is solely on these other industries. To develop this kind of automation, they need funds and IT experts, but (i) they don't have funds, especially in the US, since they aren't as well funded as IT industry, (ii) for the IT industry this kind of automation is boring, they prefer working on AI.

In my view, the overall issue is that capitalism is prone to herding and hype, and resulting suboptimal collective decision-making.

The world has never cared about what you want. Your life has always revolved around the world. Don't like it, you vs the world. Beat it if you can.

I agree. It's just some rant. Whatever, better bury it under the other comments...

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