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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.

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If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google would produce such a thing.

>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”

Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.

I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.

This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all

Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so they don't.

That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.

Personalizing any automation like that is a privacy nightmare. The system needs to know a lot about your preferences and the decisions you'd normally make yourself as well as your current circumstances since those will also influence your choices. How do you feed that into any AI without being problematic for privacy?

Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.

A personal assistant is also a privacy nightmare - to be effective they need to know a lot of personal data about you. But at least a human is one person to blame, automation means you have no idea where the data is or who can abuse it.

I don’t even think you need machine learning for this, it’s an API problem mostly like I said.

Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.

For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably

I think this is actually a deeper issue.

The CEO would trust the personal assistant to do this if they have a deep trust in the assistance competence. They would also need to know the assistant has a deep enough understanding of the their preferences to not do something they don't like. AI can mirror that.

More importantly though there will be consequences if the human assistant makes a big mistake and books the wrong flight. They would have to take responsibility for the mistake.

The LLM is always just going to write in text it is sorry if it makes a mistake. That is never going to be good enough for anything of consequence. The LLM would practically have to be omniscient in a way that is not going to be possible in a world filled with uncertainty.

So much of human activity is built around the network of trust that another human takes the blame if something goes wrong. So much activity involves coin flips and that someone takes the blame when the coin lands on heads but we bet on tails.

If I were a somebody worth a personal assistant/secretary, I'd be pissed about them doing such things without notice too

If you had such a person they would know if you wanted that service of not and act accordingly.

Your problem isn't AI, it's shitty AI. Why wouldn't you trust an AI that was competent and understood what you wanted, like any good human personal assistant?

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