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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

> “For us, our biggest goal is to create enough value that yes, you would be willing to pay for [Gemini],” Google TV VP and GM Shalini Govil-Pai told the publication.

> The executive pointed to future capabilities for the Gemini-driven Google Assistant on TVs, including asking it to “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park but suitable for young children” or to show “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission: Impossible.”

That seems so incredibly useless it reads like parody. No, I will not be willing to pay for Gemini for that.

I can’t imagine ever asking questions like those in my life... and even if one day I were drunk, high, and concussed enough to ask, I wouldn’t need to ask my TV—I could just go to claude.ai on my phone instead because I already pay for it.

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Honestly, do these people hear themselves? I guess the product echo chamber is too loud to hear the needs of actual customers (or what they don’t need).

the culture of toxic positivity at work I'm afraid

The Abilene Paradox.

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

At last, thanks!

A name for that strange time I was in a room of ~15 people chaired by me, who unanimously decided that PHP should be used for the website, made by volunteers. Yet when I asked individuals afterwards, none of them had wanted PHP, and only one or two ever used PHP.

They chose it because they incorrectly thought that's what most people wanted, and they preferred to go along with their perception of group view so readily that nobody revealed their own tech preferences, despite a long discussion.

It wasn't a compromise, because that would start with people knowing each others' preferences, then compromising.

It was more like a bad default based on incorrect beliefs about each other.

The strangest part, for me, was realising that this happened despite meeting for a good hour discussing alternative options, with several professional webdevs in the group. The groupthink effect is powerful!

The effect of the group decision was not what people in the group had hoped for. Instead of producing an attractive common interest, it resulted in few volunteers, because everyone picked a tech choice they were not interested in working with themselves, assuming it would be of more interest to others.

The same happened to me last year, on a company trip people voted to not go to a bioluminescent swimming, but when I confronted them everyone was really wanting to go. We ended up going (I can be a bit pushy), and everybody loved that experience.

This is a really good book about all kinds of similar situations:

Thomas Schelling: Micromotives and Macrobehavior

https://www.amazon.com/Micromotives-Macrobehavior-Thomas-C-S...

"In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations."

Thanks for that rec. Added to my list!

The Abilene Paradox is used to describe an unhealthy consensus.

The problem is, is that a hallmark of a healthy consensus, is that no one is really happy with the decision, and a hallmark of an unhealthy consensus, is that no one is really happy with the decision.

>a hallmark of a healthy consensus, is that no one is really happy with the decision

No, no one gets exactly what they want (unless everyone wants the same thing), but that doesn't mean everyone is unhappy with the result.

Fair point. It was really a play on words.

Very nice. It reminds me of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest : "a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive".

Nobody ever got fired for b̶u̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ I̶B̶M̶ slapping "AI-powered" on their product description.

AI is too big of a thing to ignore. if you're a CTO/CIO in 2025 and you're not at least looking into it in a cursory manner the rest of the C-levels will assume you're slacking or dumb.

of course it may be dumb to use it, and largely a way to extract value out of corporations for mediocre benefit, but that's still not yet certain at this point.

Group think or not, you gotta at least do something with it. FOMO -- what if you miss that bus?

Presumably there will be nag screens and innumerable dark patterns. So you will end up paying to stop the pain.

In order to increase interaction it will always default to playing movies that will cause the most disagreement between people in the room. You will have to pay to create family harmony and keep it from showing your children (or your parents) porn when you're not there.

Honestly, I like that kind of functionality. But you don't need AI for that. There are websites that have been doing this for years.

If that world comes to pass, it will become mandatory not optional and I would search for the nearest bullet to end it all. I would ask where Google is finding people to spout this codswallop but I know the answer.

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