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Comment by only-one1701 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you’ve heard that the purpose of a system is what it does?

Exactly this. These systems are supposed to have been built by some of the smartest scientific and engineering minds on the planet, yet they somehow failed (or chose not) to think about second-order effects and what steady-state outcomes their systems will have. That's engineering 101 right there.

That's because they were thinking about their stock options instead.

That's a small part on why people became more cynical of tech over the decades. At least with the internet there were large efforts to try and nail down security in the early 00's. Imagine if we instead left it devolve into a moderator-less hellscape where every other media post is some goatse style jump scare.

That's what it feels like with AI. But perhaps worse since companies are lobbying to keep the chaos instead of making a board of standards and etiquette.

This phrase almost always seems to be invoked to attribute purpose (and more specifically, intent and blame) to something based on outcomes, where it should be more considered as a way to stop thinking in terms of those things in the first place.

In broad strokes - disagree.

This is the knife-food vs knife-stab vs gun argument. Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.

> Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.

If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities.

If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.

I was going to reply to the post above but you said it perfectly.

Is it possible that these are in the top 10, but not the top 5? I'm pretty sure programming, email/meeting summaries, cheating on homework, random QA, and maybe roleplay/chat are the most popular uses.

The number of programmers in the world is vastly outnumbered by the people that do not program. Email / meeting summaries: maybe. Cheating on homework: maybe not your best example.

I do mean this is a pretty piss poor example.

Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.

To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.

Email volume is mostly robots fighting robots these days.

Today if we could survey AI contact with humans, I'm afraid the top 3 by a wide margin would be scams, cheating, deep fakes, and porn.

>that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place

Yes, and now porn is highly regulated. Maybe that's a hint?

It’s possible to write malware in C. Does that mean that C is designed to write malware?

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