Superpowers, Not Superintelligence
bond.now
bond.now
I keep feeling "surprised" that people who seemingly would know better post stuff that obviously sounds like an LLM. But then I remember, you and I aren't the audience. The audience is investors. And investors seem to love LLM-voice, because…in large part…the LLMs sound as vapid and unhelpful as the VCs.
If you can’t beat them, join them right?
AI and privacy are incompatible
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/artificial-intelligence-an...
Highlight towards the end
“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.
Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!
I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!” But will you?”
Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.
An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.
Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.
I’d take it further and say there’s nothing inherently wrong with information gathering software
The issue is that the data is not owned or controlled by the person generating it and all benefits accrue to giant systems like corporations and governments.
For example if a car rental company has my ID on file, dozens of my selfies from every time I rented, audio and video data from my trips, on one hand they are spying on me, not letting me delete the data, so it benefits them because they have all this intelligence on their customer.
On the other hand because they have that intelligence, I can be more easily approved and get into a car faster than the average person. They already know what kind of driver I am, that I’m clean, I fill up the tank, bring it back on time. I don’t have to do any work to provide that proof, and don’t have to go through delays, hit my credit report, or pay security deposits since they can just look at what kind of driver I am.
There are some cases the user shouldn’t be entitled to delete data about them - or at least it should be lawful to enter into such agreements.
The only time I think it’s unfair and should be regulated is advertising and dynamic pricing. All things related to targeted ads feels like a misuse of technology - and yet I don’t mind it if two people mutually enter into an agreement where both parties benefit, or at the very least the user is compensated.
When you convert from an ad to buy something, a rebate of some small amount should credit to your account to compensate for being profiled/tracked and served the ad you converted on. Paid for by the profiling/tracking/ad serving company (out of the revenue from the advertiser).
This is an app. Not a protocol, not a platform, an app.
It's just... a way to remember stuff? You're handing all this data to a company, relying on "trust me bro, we'll be responsible" as a promise to be ethical?
This is beyond perplexing.
I.e. the most dangerous program you can imagine.
What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?
Before Grubhub, did you feel that way about pizza delivery?
> are in fact damaged by people buying everything online
You enjoyed ordering from mail order catalogs?
Reality check: Before online shopping became a thing, the vast majority of towns in the US did not have a store that had everything you wanted to buy. You had to find a potential dealer in town, get them to order it for you, and pay a premium for that service.
I lived for a number of years in a town that had no FedEx or UPS office. So if you missed a delivery that required a signature, you'd have to drive to the town that did - a 45 minute drive (and in winter, a risky drive if there was snow).
I didn't have a car, so I had to make sure I'm there for 3-4 hours or longer awaiting delivery. If I missed it (I never did), it simply meant the product would get returned, and I'd pay the vendor some kind of fee (restocking, shipping, whatever). It's only the convenience of the Internet that solved some of these problems.
Are there downsides to everything you mentioned? Sure. There are upsides to all of them as well. You're taking a multifaceted concept and reducing it down, not even to a continuum, but to a binary.
Next up: Oh drinking alcohol is an enjoyable social activity? Well tell that to my uncle who drank 4 liters of vodka and DIED.
I made no such binary distinction, not sure what you're accusing me of.
I am in fact making the same argument you are: there are pros and cons. This was made in rebuttal to the prior comment, which suggested that the people who said "there are cons" or even "there may be cons" have been consistently proven wrong.
But your first 3 paragraphs serve no one but you.
My suggestion for your future, if you'll consider it, is to write those first 3 paragraphs (they feel good to write!), but next, take a deep breath and delete them.
I agree with your point by the way - everything has pros and cons - and there're tipping points. "Too much of a good thing" is true of so much in life.
You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.
> What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this?
Many, many people outsource things like meal prep.
You think the former is outsourcable and preferable to the latter? I could make terrible judgments on you I won’t post because they’re cheap, or maybe you’re childless and young and have a cynical view of the world, but holy crap, in the context of this broader convo, and site, is a real “wtf” moment I can’t really do anything but digest in real time.
Outsourcing meals includes eating out or buying for take out. According to your standards, pretty much every dad sucks.
> Put yourself in the pov of the daughter - “daddy thinks this isn’t worth his time but the ai says i’ll like it and i do” and the dad that wakes his kid up early to give them a special breakfast he spent time and energy on perfecting for the impossible child diet.
I've yet to come across a dad who does this every single morning for his daughter.
> You think the former is outsourcable and preferable to the latter?
As I said in another comment, it's not an either-or.
Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?
What a miserable mindset.
After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.
For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.
My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.
Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.
Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.
That's because he rarely cooked, and ate out often. When you get married, cook almost every day, and have kids, washing dishes by hand becomes anything but therapeutic.
Do you have a kid? How often are you cooking for the kid? Doing it multiple times a week for 15+ years becomes a chore. Most of the meals you cook aren't well thought out - they're "Family needs to be fed - what's the quickest thing I can make?" Then, once in a while, you want to put in the effort and cook something nice, and it becomes meaningful. Those have always been the exceptions when both parents have full time jobs.
Getting an algorithm to plan the recipe and order ingredients is for all the other times you cook. Not for the meaningful ones.
It's also not an either/or. You have the freedom to do it as often or as little as you want.
Now here's my question: Say only 10% of the meals you cook are carefully thought out. 90% are done with your brain on autopilot. Are you going to criticize someone for now doing a 10-30-60 split, where the 30% is using some algorithm to actually make something nice for the kid? You're not losing any of the meaningful time you had before.
Another way to frame this: Overworked parents decide to take the family out for junk food once in a while. It's a treat for the kids, and it's a way for the parents to get relief. It's simply another way of outsourcing the labor, just as the AI example is. Do you criticize such parents saying that instead of meaningfully trying to make a nice dinner, they're offloading it to a 3rd party?
Maybe Zuck's daughter appreciates cooking differently than you do. If AI helps her enjoy the part she likes about cooking by getting her past whatever friction would make her less likely to cook otherwise, then good for her.
Not the actual act of baking? Or having someone come home and say "WOW IT SMELLS GOOD IN HERE"...or taking it around to your friends/family/neighbors and sharing what you made?
If you feel automating those initial steps removes all meaningfulness from the act, what do you feel about people who just buy a package of cookies from a supermarket?
- bills? bookkeeping? reading DMARC emails? yeah, i want to do none of it, but i desperately want these chores done.
- spend time with kids? study interesting topics? eat and drink interesting things? i want more of this.
We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.
That, is also a thought terminating cliche. Sure we want to choose what we spend time on, however, we don't know what experiences will meaningfully contribute to our lives. It is only after we have gone through them that we realize which ones were significant. And these vary for everyone.
I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.
Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?
And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>
Millions of people live about the way you have described, doing manual chores (perhaps out of necessity), and may be they are missing out on the joys of commenting on HN or may be I am indeed missing out on something when I eschew some degree of manual work (I have experienced this).
The point is not automating stuff, it is what do you do when you have automated the boring stuff that is matter - do you just scroll your feed ? Not to mention that some amount of boredom is necessary to make us value the interesting aspect of life.
OP is more correct than you realize. Your judgement of how life was is in the past, while what your life is in the now.
I do. It's easy, fun and they're nicer (lower water content) than supermarket ones. You don't even need a garden. Can recommend.
No thank you. I’ll keep my personal memories personal. Many of them not even digital.
"Capture the daily moments that define you. Voice the hidden details and tell the story only you can tell."
"We may sell, transfer or otherwise share [..] including personal information"