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Comment by hi_hi | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it all come down to "what is the ideal interface for humans to deal with digital information"?

We're getting more and more information thrown at us each day, and the AIs are adding to that, not reducing it. The ability to summarise dense and specialist information (I'm thinking error logs, but could be anything really) just means more ways for people to access and view that information who previously wouldn't.

How do we, as individuals, best deal with all this information efficiently? Currently we have a variety of interfaces, websites, dashboards, emails, chat. Are all these necessary anymore? They might be now, but what about the next 10 years. Do I even need to visit a companies website if can get the same information from some single chat interface?

The fact we have AIs building us websites, apps, web UI's just seems so...redundant.

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Websites were a way to get authoritative information about a company, from that company (or another trusted source like Wikipedia). That trust is powerful, which is why we collectively spent so much time trying to educate users about the "line of death" in browsers, drawing padlock icons, chasing down impersonator sites, mitigating homoglyph attacks, etc. This all rested on the assumption that certain sites were authoritative sources of information worth seeking out.

I'm not really sure what trust means in a world where everyone relies uncritically on LLM output. Even if the information from the LLM is usually accurate, can I rely on that in some particularly important instance?

You raise a good point, and one I rarely see discussed.

I still believe it fundamentally comes down to an interface issue, but how trust gets decoupled from the interface (as you said, the padlock shown in the browser and certs to validate a website source), thats an interesting one to think about :-)

I imagine there will be the same problems as with Facebook and other large websites, that used their power to promote genocide. If you're in the mood for some horror stories:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

When LLM are suddenly everywhere, who's making sure that they are not causing harm? I got the above link from Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/diseconomies-scale/) and if his text there is anything to go by, the large companies producing LLMs will have very little interest in making sure their products are not causing harm.

In some cases like the Air Canada one where the courts made them uphold a deal offered by their chatbot it'll be "accurate" information whether the company wants it to be or not!

Not not everything an LLM tells you is going to be worth going to court over if it's wrong though.

The designers of 6th gen fighter jets are confronting the same challenge. The cockpit, which is an interface between the pilot and the airframe, will be optionally manned. If the cockpit is manned, the pilot will take on a reduced set of roles focused on higher-level decision making.

By the 7th generation it's hard to see how humans will still be value-add, unless it's for international law reasons to keep a human in the loop before executing the kill chain, or to reduce Skynet-like tail risks in line with Paul Christiano's arms race doom scenario.

Perhaps interfaces in every domain will evolve this way. The interface will shrink in complexity, until it's only humans describing what they want to the system, at higher and higher levels of abstraction. That doesn't necessarily have to be an English-language interface if precision in specification is required.

Is this just what you think it might happen or are you directly involved in these decisions and first-hand exposing a challenge?

We will get to the dream of Homer Simpson gorging on donuts and "operating" a nuclear power plant.

> keep a human in the loop before executing the kill chain, or to reduce Skynet-like tail risks in line with Paul Christiano's arms race doom scenario.

It is a little known secret that plenty of defense systems are already set up to dispense of the human in the loop protocol before a fire action. For defense primarily, but also for attack once a target has been designated. I worked on protocols in the 90's, and this decision was already accepted.

It happens to be so effective that the military won't bulge on this.

Also, it is not much worse to have a decision system act autonomously for a kill system, if you consider that the alternative is a dumb system such as a landmine.

Btw: while there always is a "stop button" in these systems, don't be fooled. Those are meant to provide semblance of comfort and compliance to the designers of those systems, but are hardly effective in practice.

Computers / the web are a fast route to information, but they are also a storehouse of information; a ledger. This is the old "information wants to be free, and also very expensive." I don't want all the info on my PC, or the bank database, to be 'alive', I want it to be frozen in kryptonite, so it's right where I left it when I come back.

I think we're slowly allowing AI access to the interface layer, but not to the information layer, and hopefully we'll figure out how to keep it that way.

I like the smartphone. It’s honestly perfect and underutilized.

Every human is different, don't generalize the interface. Dynamically customize it on the fly.

yep I think this is the fundamental question as well, everything else is intermediate

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