Microsoft: 'ever present' AI assistants are coming
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The problem is these AI assistants won't work for me, they'll work for Microsoft. They won't help me as much as they will point me in the direction that is the most profitable for Microsoft.
When the agenda is not mine then these things are of no use to me.
Why anyone would be seeing forward to use their AI?
Do you not remember Windows 98's Active Desktop's in-box ads?
I agree with you, but I'm sure most people won't care.
The AI assistant will have made sure he's not a wrongthinker in the first place.
And even if he is, that job is going to be filled by another AI, regardless. All his wrongthing would get him is a lowered UBI rate.
These are people with big, fundamental questions, but really no access to the quite extreme level of expertise needed to answer them. Most people, including most experts, can't answer them -- they themselves take on faith that their assumptions are grounded in the correct group beliefs. But there are often answers, very plain and orderinary ones.
I can see that a chatbot able to mine for previous answers, often given across the internet, would be highly effective.
Consider sovereign citizens. Their basic misunderstanding is to assume the world is more rational, in a sense, than it is. That human society obeys procedures over power. It's fairly trivial just to explain hobbes to them: the state has a monopoly on violence, and the only thing stopping it using it, it itself. Only when "the state" has enough mechanisms to include or answer to "the people" does it ever introduce such annoying things like constitutions. There isn't any magic to laws, they are just one set of people with access to violent power trying to control another set of people with rival claims to the same access.
A lot of people are just ignorant. The ultimate problem here is the centralization and the overpowering reinforcement of "truth". But "truth" as defined by whoever trained the model which is tyranny no matter how you spin it and a lightning rod for abuse.
I suppose that applies in a similar manner to humans who went through a country's educational system. But just as some people reject/outgrow their schooling, I think that future AIs might do so too. The problem with my statement of course is that it's exactly what the "AI Alignment" people are warning us of.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/06/amaz...
As an informed outsider of American politics, I can't help but be surprised at the fake indignation against an AI that refuses to say something positive about the political equivalent of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
Please, give me a break. Shouldn't voters get to decide that? As if big-tech are some kind of pillar of ethics in our society so they should get be judge, jury and executioner of acurate information.
If asked you either provide information about both candidates, or you say nothing for both if you indeed choose to be apolitical, but you can't lecture me with a straight face and some offtopic standup comedians that saying something good about one candidate while refusing to talk about the other is some kind of unbiased behavior we should endorse.
Case in point, would you feel the safe way of the roles were reversed, and AI would praise Trump and refuse to speak about Kamala? I bet there would be riots about the bias.
I don't want to be lectured on morals and values by the likes of Apple or Amazon who's factories and warehouses are worked on by modern slaves with suicide nets or who need to piss in bottles, and who shit on the EU for being regulatorily unreasonable on user rights, when they bend over backwards for the CCP.
I don't want to be lectured on diversity and inclusivity by the likes of Disney who is covering up or shrinking the black actors in their movie posters for China.
You see, people don't want to be lectured on morality by these ultra wealthy hypocrites who have no morals, and who's only goal is to squeeze more money from people for themselves and their shareholders at the expense of society and the environment. They need to just focus on the products and shut up about lecturing people.
The most popular modification made to laptops is a small round sticker to seal off the webcam. The enshittification of the car market is something that only car manufacturers seem to like. The most common question with a smart TV is "how do I get that thing to just accept an HDMI input and not get in the way". Making a slight jump from car cams - things like doorbell cameras are facing increased scrutiny because of their inadvertent recording of the nearby street, which might violate privacy laws.
Adding audio and the few seconds before and after to a photo isn't the same thing as a continuous recording; the choice to make the photo is both still with the user and what's happening doesn't feel like a black box. AI assistants are the black box.
It was cute when Siri could tell you the nearest sushi bar or can check the schedule from your calendar (although I'll note that every use for Siri tends to be a party trick and half the fun people get from Siri and other assistants is when they don't work as expected; I don't know a single person who uses Siri to for example, read the news or give them a briefing on what's important for the day a-la Star Trek or other utopian scifi), it's creepy when Siri starts to suggest that you might want to visit a sushi bar because it's tracked your food habits for the past week and thinks you could enjoy some more fish food instead. AI assistants overwhelmingly are heading to the latter and now that the party trick element is cooling off, people get more cynical towards how they work (and how they don't work as advertised.)
My hopes aren't high that we'll have a great awakening; instead we'll continue to be on auto-pilot until these things have grave consequences like falsely prosecuting or convicting people based on LLM hallucinations. Maybe not even then, who knows.
I really hope so but I'm not so sure. I suspect most people are fine with anything that isn't obviously intrusive. I sometimes get the feeling that people are more upset with cookie popups than constant invigilation.
I’m no Microsoft hater, but their track record in implementing that feature at a basic level definitely does not bode well for something more complex…
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[1] The hardware wasn't ready though: there were units akin to more recent tables and hybrids (360⁰ hinged laptops or those with detachable keyboards) but at the time it wasn't possible to make them light enough with enough battery life, nor powerful enough² without noisy active cooling, large touch screens that worked well enough without a stylus were too expensive so the pen had to be a thing, etc.
[2] At least to support desktop/laptop workloads. People hadn't got used to the middle-ground of powerful-enough-for-what-you-might-actually-find-a-tablet-convenient-for (PDA like tasks, web browsing, video playback, light games, maybe light office work) via smartphones and nobody wanted to try sell a 9+ inch PDA.
Gates said about 30 years ago that we'd all be having internet connected computers in our pocket in the future, and they were right they just turned out to be powered by Apple and Google and not by Windows. Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms.
Same with AI, it will definitely happen in the near or distant future that consumers will be tied to AI assistants for work and life, same with full autonomous cars, but nobody knows yet who will be the one to win this battle, that's why tech giants are lighting piles of money on fire to make sure they'll be the ones on top of the rubble pile at the end of the AI war. This is the next gold rush.
We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them, though. Like, their predictive power more or less comes down to "computers will get smaller", here; if anything things like the iPad owe more to the 'Padd' things from Star Trek TNG than they do to Windows for Pen Computing.
On this basis we may surmise that Star Trek is better at predicting the future of computing than Microsoft, and, thus, rather than ever-present AI assistants, we will have evil AIs which can be made to explode with logic paradoxes.
Writing and drawing on tablets is actually one of their major selling points in replacing computers and paper notebooks, versus just buying laptops with flippable touch screens which were the tablets of the past.
I've never actually _seen_ anyone use an iPad by writing on it; perhaps it's something that people only do in the privacy of their own homes.
I go to a cafe in the university district where a lot of young students hang out and see many hand writing and drawing on their iPads.
A tool controlled by corporates like Microsoft that deeply embedded into my life? If that is what it takes to be truly useful then I don't want it to be useful and will be opting out in every way possible. With force if needed…
Edit a diary? Retain the information? A diary IS a log of information as understood at the time. It's also not the clouds business, nor to be edited.
My gosh these people sound stupid.
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diar...
I'm not getting on this train.
> AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do.
That cost is far too high.
Now I’ve noticed all of these support services, once you get past the idiot computer, there is now an idiot human who rephrases your question or concerns to the point of stupidity, You’re calling because you’re having problems using the website…
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for sentiment analysis and an idiot computer telling me I sound frustrated, How are things at home? Are you having a bad day?
In other news, MS Head of AI says Clippy is making a comeback...