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Comment by pelagic_sky | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the fisherman call where you could sign up to have a professional fisherman give you a wake up call. https://soranews24.com/2017/05/12/japanese-fishermen-start-m...

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  “Good morning! Are you up?” asks the fisherman in the video, to which the user replies “Yes, thanks to you. Are you on your ship?” “Yeah, I got up at 3, so I’m already on the sea,” he replies, before adding “I caught a really big fish.”

I’m not sure how much demand there is for this product, but that really brought a smile to my face.

I don’t speak Japanese but I would pay for this. Trying to get up and run before 6 is a chore. Having a fisherman wake up call would be awesome and motivating. Especially for someone who loves fishing.

I found Wakie[1] in 2015 while on a project in London. Every morning at a specific time you set, a stranger (real person and no AI) would call you and talk to you briefly, waking you up. I used it for about a month.

1. https://wakie.com

How interesting, can you share some pros and cons from the one month experience? Was it always the same person?

There was always a different caller. One thing I vividly remember was when I found it really hard to understand a pretty heavy Scottish accent. I'm not random-social enough to be talking to new people every day, but it was a fun experience. Fun for that short interval but not really my type of thing.

I would prefer this very much to Jocko Willink

Last year it was a real fisherman.

Next year it will be an AI.

But AI is like video games, it can’t emulate sacrifice and other deep human dynamics because there’s no stake. If you die you restore from last save point. For AI you have infinite no-memory interactions, which changes the dynamic. In other words, your actions don’t have lasting consequences.

The few games that succeed in building something deeper (for me RDR2 but you take your pick) have to carve out sacrifice and character out of the player’s time, which is finite.

Well said. If I signed up for this and I knew it was AI calls, I would likely not pick up. But if I knew it was a person calling me, there's a much stronger emotional incentive to pick up and talk to them.

Exactly. These are the things I think many companies will fail to realize as they slap "AI" onto and into their products and services.

Given Japan's extreme conservatism, I doubt it.

Check out their robots.

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

Female companion robot as early as 2005.

Japan has an exception to copyright law allowing for analysis, which has been (ab)used to train AIs to generate Studio Ghibli style content.

I want a wake up call from David Goggins.

I want one from Walton Goggins.

Baby Billy’s Bright Beginnings

That caused a much needed chuckle this morning.

I think literally and figuratively it would involve a bathtub full of icewater.

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