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Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#291

Post by esafak »

raincole wrote: post #271
hospitalJail wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr. >unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans. Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food.

> your after-work time pays 0$/hr. I'm sure no economist would agree with the kind of perspective. I mean, yeah, it pays 0$/hr... but it doesn't mean it's worth just 0$/hr. > Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food Only if you believe after-work time worths 0$. (I don't think anyone seriously believes this)

If you believe that, you should just get a second job and use that time more "productively".

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#292

Post by antonvs »

pjc50 wrote: post #137
chasd00 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simulate human affection LLM sexbots could be pretty useful

Every "AI chat" service either leans into or fights the "alignment problem" of whether it wants to be an AI sex chat bot service. See controversy over Replika.

The alignment problem in that case is a lot simpler. Will this appendage fit into that receptacle.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#293

Post by cal85 »

BizarreByte wrote: post #37
softbt wrote: post #17

Really don’t like the idea that we will act as interfaces for the AI, I honestly believe it will only many the majority of people lazier and dumber. I’m also incredibly shocked that no one is talking about AI as a friend/companion, that has to not be good for you in the long run. Humans need real human connection, AI is too artificial for that (duh). Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead…

> Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up A person who is starving will do better with fast food than with no food at all. It's far from ideal, but for some people this will make their lives marginally more tolerable.

This analogy is not even wrong. Yes, if someone was suffering starvation I'd give them whatever food was available, but that is not a situation in which we find ourselves ever – it does not occur, nor does the analogous situation occur.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#294

Post by aero-deck »

uoaei wrote: post #268
aero-deck wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are actually multiple "arenas of discourse" and people will simply switch the "marketplace" they're using. It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.

No, it's a feature of the human mind that truth is considered objective independent of the lens used to acquire it. "Post-truth" sources in some arenas will be conflated with "real-truth" sources in others, leading to a blanket demotion of the perceived value and quality of truth. The whole argument from TFA is about human psychology, not about specific offerings of "marketplaces" where truth may be more or less mali…

dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is not a discussion that HN handles well.

IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#295

Post by hospitalJail »

grog454 wrote: post #278
hospitalJail wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr. >unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans. Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food.

Overtime or another job? If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale work.

Need to include real estate, marketing, and profit. If its not a mom and pop place, HR + corporate.

Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture has limited the number of licenses)

Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#296

Post by hospitalJail »

ladberg wrote: post #267
hospitalJail wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr. >unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans. Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food.

I don't mean the cost of my time that work pays me, just how much money I'd personally pay to avoid doing something something I don't like (schlepping grocery bags on the subway, doing dishes). In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes it a treat, not the rest of it. Some prepared food within walking distance most definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within walking distance. It works out just…

>It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.

I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it being 3 minutes walking away.

I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if something is cheaper or more expensive.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#298

Post by LogoEthoPatho »

moojd wrote: post #256
gadders wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think political or cultural issues are particularly amenable to objective truth anyway. You can't run randomised control trials for most of the main political or cultural points of contention.

Yeah they are tangental concepts. Truth is only useful politically to inform decision making. Political frameworks and decisions are fundamentally subjective and would still vary wildly even if we could all agree on fundamental truths. It's the main reason I'm skeptical of technocracy.

On that topic, few things bother me more than the phrase "trust the science."

I understand the intention, but we should be encouraging skepticism and engagement with the underlying tools and methodology.

People will scoff at this but you can find a ton of different "Flat Earthers" either accidentally proving the earth is curved using their own experiments (Eg. Bob Knodel), or even dying trying to prove them (Eg. "Mad" Mike Hughes).

Science is not some "pure" pursuit of truth, with no care for politics, economics, social influence, or biases. Technocrats genuinely scare me, as they often combine these two things, by claiming authority via "trust the science" type nonsense, while holding delusions of scientific purity.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#299

Post by antonvs »

belugacat wrote: post #258
rcktmrtn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than interfaces. To quote McLuhan: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth." The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of the same process.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens : “Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding un…

This kind of take mainly seems an expression of the human tendency to see the world in terms of hierarchies l, and obsession with being near the top of those hierarchies. In this model, the idea of e.g. symbiotic relationships simply doesn't compute.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#300

Post by wincy »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #72
resolutebat wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of jobs are already human interfaces for computers. Ever talked or messages with a call center? They're following scripts and trying to pattern match your problem with what they have to work with manually, AI is just going to 10x this for both good and bad. Mostly bad, I suspect, because good luck getting an AI to escalate to a supervisor.

I bank with a small credit union. They have a phone robot who asks what I need help with, and so far no matter what I've said, the response has always been to think for a few seconds and then say, "I'll connect you to a representative." It's wonderful.

McDonald’s has a drive thru voice assistant that also did this for the first few months. But now it catches virtually everything.

Similar to what someone else said I’d imagine they gathered the considerable voice samples from a few months of thousands of McDonald’s locations, and trained on that data.

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