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> [...] broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds [...]

It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.

I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to competently represent my interests.

That said, that's a big if, i.e., whether commercial LLMs or agents will be able to do that, given the overwhelming pressure to just take money from both sides of the transaction and skew the decision.

But if it does happen, I actually see this as a huge potential factor strengthening smaller suppliers directly competing with large platforms. If my agent can independently figure out if a given supplier is trustworthy, whether their terms and conditions are reasonable etc., I'd be much more willing to engage with them outside of a large platform.

> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.

I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of ride (e.g. UberX, Premier, etc.) It defaulted to UberX, which was the cheapest option except for the "Wait and Save" option that was further down. I tapped the "Choose UberX" button and the ride was on its way.

So, OK, maybe it took literally 15 seconds. I'm not denying Uber may use dark patterns elsewhere, but from the end user experience of hailing a ride I don't see how it could be any simpler or more straightforward.

Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs? That's very common when you travel. Agent would be godsend, and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back to the phone. Anywhere.

What if the agent can also communicate with the car's agent? They may even negotiate the meeting spot. Agent is superior.

Yes I have traveled to places where I don’t speak the language, need to get an Uber at a specific place, and need to read the signs. You can get surprisingly far if you know a few words in the local language, and in your hypothetical future, even if you and the driver have an agent, what are you going to do if you need to communicate with someone in person that’s not that driver? Ask your agent to? I don’t see how that’s a feasible idea.

Why not? People are already holding their phone running Google Translate up to strangers to communicate with them.

In part because communication is not just language.

Isn’t that a good argument for needing a more capable model for assisting in it then?

Not really. You can't really train a model to perform body language.

> Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs?

This feels a lot like all those "where did the soda go" commercials (i.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/ ), where some mundane task is imagined to be hopelessly complex with a bunch of possible what-ifs. For what it's worth, yes, I have taken Uber in all of those conditions, and no, I never found it difficult or had a problem with it.

> no, I never found it difficult or had a problem with it.

If you don't even notice the dark patterns, they're working exactly as intended.

The dark patterns and generally options not presented in the app are exactly where I would expect a competent assistant to shine.

Are local taxi services cheaper and known to be more reliable? Am I missing an obvious public transit option? Is Uber pulling something creative with dynamic pricing again?

How do you think that AI Assistants would be not subject to Dark Patterns when they are literally Pattern Matching machines? Trained on General Human output and behavior.

They can consider hundreds of pages of text (including terms and conditions, public sentiment, local laws etc.) in a matter of seconds in a way that I, tired after an international flight and just wanting to get a ride to my hotel, usually can't.

> Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.

> I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to competently represent my interests.

Is there any reason to expect that commercial LLMs will avoid fine print, dark patterns, or acting against their users interests?

That's just the experience any executive with a secretary or personal assistant is used to having.

If AI allows more people to have such a premium experience, that's a use of technology that makes a lot more sense than all the "AI will take over your job" scaremongering.

Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber? There’s more complex things (the floor I think is booking a flight that doesn’t conflict with activities I have to do), but by time you summon your assistant you could’ve had the car on its way.

> Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber?

They're in the habit of their admin telling them the Uber has arrived to take them to their 3 o'clock yes.

I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two.

That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on any major technological leaps beyond continued maturation and scaling of Waymo/alternatives.

I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work too.

> I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off.

I imagine because a huge part of optimizing fleet availability and distribution is knowing where you want to go before deciding which vehicle you should travel in.

Ah, yeah, that's a good point. I can imagine some potential creative workarounds (e.g. having certain rides or types of rides involve transferring between two vehicles, possibly with multiple parties per vehicle like Uber Pool), but whether they'd actually be willing to support that is another matter entirely.

So robo taxis are going to stalk us?

lol, I mean I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think I was describing anything fundamentally different in principle from what Uber/Lyft/taxis already do. Like when you walk out of an airport or a super busy bar/club and there's already a line of cabs waiting for anyone who needs one to get in.

Or you know, maybe have public transport that's available so you can easily get it to where you need to go.

Having a city's worth of automated cars driving around all the time sounds like a hellscape.

I'd feel safer with streets populated by fleets of mature autonomous vehicles than the current status quo, even (or especially) when traveling by foot and train (which I do often). Public transit is great, but cars also exist for good reasons.

The streets would be far safer with far fewer cars on the road. Having automated fleets just increases the number of cars on the roads making the streets less safe. This is due to each fleet needing enough capacity on the road at any time to handle the demand and response times expected.

> Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable?

Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work.

If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.

The “agent knows where you’re going and calls a car for you” sounds dystopian as hell if done totally autonomously. But you could also imagine that an agent pops up a message on your watch “hey, you’ve been at dinner for an hour, if you’re winding down I can call you a car in 15 minutes” and suddenly it’s not that absurd.

> and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.

That feels a little bit of muddling the waters. At least on Android with which I'm familiar, (a) you can turn off the "OK Google" detection in settings so that it's not always listening (and I'm not sure what the setup is now but originally I had to opt it to OK Google detection) and (b) the path for OK Google detection runs on a lower power, on device chip that only has capacity to store like the last few seconds of ambient noise to look for the assistant key phrase.

Agreed, plus it ignores all the commentary making a fuss about phones listening, even here on HN.

Just because it's a losing battle doesn't mean nobody cares.