Deeper interface to wade through, even more mysterious & distancing, oh great.
What is changing about how we use computers that is genuinely getting us more in touch, more aware, more capable as computer users?
AI is about to change how you use computers
71–80 of 91 posts
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#72An agent is an amazing idea, and it would add enormous convenience - if implemented well. But we're a long, long, long, long, long way away from agents. What we have now aren't even precursors to agents, more like very distant cousins to an ancestor. In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above. And if we have that, the entire world is…
Work may change significantly soon. Slack lets your conversation kinda go. What happens when slack starts remembering tasks someone asked you to do... follows up with you to make sure you did it? And the person that originally asked you? Right now you arrive at work and you have a few things to do, but your brain only remembers 1 of them, and barely at that. With AI it will have a few iterations on emails ready for y…
I have my own todo lists, calendar, and notes. I don’t need to give up my whole privacy to take care of this.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#73> And even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. Good, that's how I would like it to be!
This is how I would like it to be only because I can't trust it to treat my information well. If it was a trustworthy system, this would be an incredible capability.
It would be great to have this kind of agent and trust it is truly working for you, yes. Given economic (and political) reality, I don't think anyone needs to wonder where things are most likely to land. There will be practically no market for actual user agents that work purely on behalf of end users. Rather, "your" agent will tattle to the police if you do something naughty, tell advertisers how you spend all your time and every preference you express, tattle to copyright holders if you play music for a party of unlicensed listeners, or just make sure you're billed properly every time you attend such a party. I think Gates refers to the question of how data sovereignty and privacy play into this as an "open question" in order to avoid addressing it, knowing full well that lack of data sovereignty turns this tool of empowerment into something much more dystopian.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What are some AI-proof(ish) industries we can jump into after software engineering is drastically reduced? Hospitality will always be a thing. There's a reason why the Enterprise-D still has a human bartender that makes real drinks, even though it's completely superfluous. People will always want to be served by other humans, even if AI Android tech became perfect.
The Doylist reason was "we need a role for Whoopi Goldberg". There is no Watsonian reason, as Data did bar duty in the episode they had their memories wiped. Looking back at them, the taking points about AI are basically the same now as in each episode of TNG, DS9, and VOY that is focused on AI, in the form of Data, Moriarty, The Doctor (and if he has copyright over his holonovel), that Irish village in Voyager, Wesl…
>The Doylist reason was "we need a role for Whoopi Goldberg"
Fair, but the point still stands. A better example would be Quark's from DS9. Even in a world of perfect replication and perfect androids, people are always going to want a human touch for these things.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Work may change significantly soon. Slack lets your conversation kinda go. What happens when slack starts remembering tasks someone asked you to do... follows up with you to make sure you did it? And the person that originally asked you? Right now you arrive at work and you have a few things to do, but your brain only remembers 1 of them, and barely at that. With AI it will have a few iterations on emails ready for y…
What he's talking about is absolutely not possible with an LLM. An LLM is just for language and has no deeper understanding, reasoning, logic, learning and growth, etc. See here: "Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them . They accomplish tasks across application s. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your…
All of that is possible with LLMs:
> They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them.
An LLM can capture things that are "todos" very easily now. If someone messages you and says "can you collect data on the Brenda client" it can know that this is a request.
Further, if you give it access to notion or company wiki, it could be tuned to understand your clients, work and much much more.. The LLM can, in today's work: open an email, or a VSCode instance with some pre-filled connection to your analytics database - maybe even a sample query with the Brenda client pre-filled.
Across applications - this is more-or-less something that will be coming soon. Within a few months you will see pretty much every major OS (linux, Mac, Windows) announce OS level APIs to interact with a basic LLM, and paid for LLMs. This will enable applications to start communicating with each other because they will generally understand what you're typing and output function calls..
When applications can ubiquitously call "predict(...)" at the OS level, and probably many other AI APIs that will be introduced, you will see a HUGE change in interactivity.
Now that being said, it sounds like you're picturing Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or Will Smith in I-Robot.
There's a huge in-between you're extending his conversation to that's totally unnecessary.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#76The writing is on the wall. It's not right now, but it will be in my lifetime. What are some AI-proof(ish) industries we can jump into after software engineering is drastically reduced?
This type of sentiment is not valuable at all and overly pessimistic. Current AI tech is not very likely to replace work that requires a modicum of logical reasoning and the tech to do so has no known path forward as of now.
Why do you think those things? Logic & theorem provers massively predate LLMs, and getting LLMs to use them is as easy as asking the LLM to write a proof in the language of your theorem prover of choice, which you can then copy-paste into that theorem prover and execute. And if/when it doesn't work, the error message itself helps with a significant fraction of most other programming problems, so my guess is they would also help here.
Also, there have been substantial new developments and discoveries about what transformer models do (both internally and in terms of capacity) every week or two for most of this year, so why do you think there's no known path forward?
Thinking of logic, I just tried the following with gpt-3.5, gpt-4, and gpt-4-1106-preview. The newest model spotted the trick (and then still got it wrong), the older two didn't even spot the trick. Can you spot the trick?
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A person is in Nairobi. They board a plane, fly 9000 km north, then 1000 km east, then 9000 km south, then 1000 km west. Where are they now?
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI will never write software for the same reason professional chefs will never be replaced by robots. Sure, certain parts of our jobs (the fast food equivalent work) will be assisted, and then replaced, with AI help. Ops is already benefitting from AI assistance with things like log correlation and managing incidents, and all of that is great! But the fact is that AI will still require the input of humans to solve pr…
Sounds more like hope to me. There's nothing special about creativity. The real reason chefs won't be released by robots sooner than AI and software devs is a lot more boring. Sensorimotor and physical perception is harder than reasoning and "creativity". It doesn't help that we don't know how to digitize taste so any model with a good sense of taste will have to develop it indirectly incentivized by something else (…
I see GPT and similar LLMs as basically like managing an over-eager intern. Have you ever tried to do that?
They're overflowing with ideas and knowledge and passion, and "all" you have to do is point them in the right direction. Except that when you review their code, you find that they didn't consider about a thousand different edge cases. Oh, and they didn't follow the style guide. Oh, and they are way over-focused on the wrong parts of the problem, prematurely optimizing performance in places where it doesn't matter. Oh, and their code is nigh-on unreadable. Oh, and they wrote a bunch of code that is already provided in libraries, but they just didn't know about it, and their implementation is probably full of subtle bugs so they should just use the library version. Oh, and they forgot to update the CI because now they need to pull in a new dependency to run their tests. Oh, and... the list goes on.
I don't ever see AI progressing past the regurgitation stage; you can give it as much knowledge as you want, and it can rearrange and reproduce and restate that knowledge in a thousand different ways; but we're so far from AI being able to handle all the details of our work, that as I said above, fully specifying the problem is going to be just as much work as doing the work yourself. And you'll still need expertise to do so, because our software systems are complex and full of nuance that can't be easily communicated to a machine.
AI doomers always strike me as people who have never had to try to corral interns; maybe that's an overly specific life experience to expect someone to have, but it's a really useful proxy for how much "more productive" we're going to get with AI. A really good intern can solve simple problems given exact constraints, but anything requiring lateral thinking will take them a lot of coaxing to get to the right solution. And that's okay! People can learn and get better. But I don't see AI getting better "enough" to take on anything beyond that first rung of the ladder of complexity.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no choice. They collect and serve whether you want it or not. Whether it's regulated or not. Whether it's banned or not. You can use alternatives but you have to maintain them meticulously. If any of their websites or services can get a bit in, you're fucked. Welcome to the world of quantum computers, pseudo-AGI and corporate interests.
I disagree. I totally have a choice. I can avoid it all by avoiding using the technology. Maintaining my own alternatives isn't a big deal. I'm largely doing that anyway.
How do plan to avoid the AI overlord camera system that is already in many grocery stores? Instant facial recognition when you walk into the store. Directly tied to your credit card you used on the way out last time. They mapped out your route you are most likely to take. How long until your phone is buzzing to alert you of a hot deal on aisle 12, when you are in aisle 12, for that sugar free soda you drink?
Oh yeah, don't forget they are sharing this information with an ad agency who covered the installation cost of not only your grocery store, but also your bank and gas station. All of those prefernces, tied together in a neat little digital folder, ready to sell to the highest bidding government agency.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how I would like it to be only because I can't trust it to treat my information well. If it was a trustworthy system, this would be an incredible capability.
I'm anxiously watching two developing spaces for this reason: 1. Homomorphic Encryption 2. Self-Hosted AI Systems Homomorphic encryption is the idea that you can perform ML operations on encrypted data -- so that the providers of powerful AI need not know precisely what data you have. Self-Hosted AI is just what it sounds like -- what if your Alexa processed on-device, and never left your home? What if your mobile de…
I think device specific self hosted AI is coming. At least that's what I see from marketing stuff the chip companies send me. I think it could make some sense from the a cost perspective. The manufacturer of an appliance likely doesn't want to pay reoccurring fees for smart features which require uploading audio and video to the cloud.
Re: AI is about to change how you use computers
#80An agent is an amazing idea, and it would add enormous convenience - if implemented well. But we're a long, long, long, long, long way away from agents. What we have now aren't even precursors to agents, more like very distant cousins to an ancestor. In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above. And if we have that, the entire world is…
> In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above. Worse, you'd need an AGI that was relentless, creative, able to lie and deceive, to mimic, to charm and flatter, to subtly threaten or act subservient, to be taciturn and know when to be silent, and generally socially engineer, understand rules and break them. And that's just me dealing w…
> Worse, you'd need an AGI that was relentless, creative, able to lie and deceive, to mimic, to charm and flatter, to subtly threaten or act subservient, to be taciturn and know when to be silent, and generally socially engineer, understand rules and break them.
So, Bing Chat?