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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#591

Post by iamthefury »

the__alchemist wrote: post #460
echelon wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms: - Marketing emails - YouTube sponsorship clips - Banner ads - Google search ads - Actual human salespeople - ... It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives. Fur…

This was present in the book Fall;, or, Dodge in Hell. (Published in 2019; takes place in the near future) Everyone had a personal AI assistant as you describe to curate the internet. A big part of the motivation was to filter the spam. A secondary affect was that the internet was even further divided into echo chambers.

Williams Gibson also describes this in Idoru - a virtual world with digital bugs that eat spam.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#592

Post by sebastiennight »

echelon wrote: post #422
madamelic wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".

There will be a uBlock Origin for that.

I think GP's comment describes the business model of AdBlock / AdBlock Plus / Ghostery to a tee, and they collectively seem to be bigger in usage and notoriety than uBlock.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#593

Post by sebastiennight »

lukan wrote: post #468
segmondy wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography…

"Putting man on the moon or ecommerce" The comparison here is between moonlanding and advertisement. So I choose the moon obviously. Ecommerce can work just the same without LLM augmented personalized ads, or no advertisement at all. If a law would ban all commercial advertisement - people still need to buy things. But who would miss the ads?

To complement your argument, I once was invited to speak at an event in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and was astonished to learn that outdoors advertising is _banned_ in that city.

Yet somehow people have still been buying mattresses, cars, and laundry detergent.

I can't say I missed the ads one minute during my trip.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#594

Post by k8sagic »

richrichie wrote: post #569
davidgerard wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense. you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that * Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide * THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND…

You are not comparing apples to apples. BTC is comparable to gold or US treasuries. How often do you transact in physical gold? What is time taken from a piece of gold in your pocket to cash to coffee? However, you can transact in paper gold eg the ETF GLD in microseconds with comparatively much lower transaction costs (settlement is still not immediate). How often do you transact in treasury bonds? Try paying for a…

So now a cryptopro tells us that bitcoin shouldn't replace the USD?

Thats so fun because apparently everyone doing bitcoin does it for a different reason.

Anyway do you believe that when the world goes down and you need your gold, you will be able to use bitcoin?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#595

Post by Ajedi32 »

drdrek wrote: post #194
castigatio wrote: post #17

It's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploit…

But this is already the situation in the last 15 years, your gmail spam filter is already a machine learning algorithm that filters out automatically generated content. Mail as a vetted technology is way ahead of other forms of communications in the department of filtering unwanted content. Anyone that tried to set up a new email domain will tell you its quite a serious task. Email spammers are constantly on the run,…

IMO Facebook has an even better solution: simply don't let people send you unsolicited private messages unless they're a friend or a friend of a friend. Lots of email spam gets through my spam filters, but I've never been spammed through Facebook Messenger before (except maybe once or twice when a friend got their account compromised).

Things get much harder when you want to view public posts by strangers, but I imagine some kind of similar reputation-based system could still work.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#597

Post by webninja »

taneq wrote: post #570
webninja wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wonder. Have you seen the Federal government’s debt? It’s existential. At least your grandparents got to live a nice life. usdebtclock.org

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "government debt" the sum total of currency issued, rather than being like the balance on a credit card? It's better thought of as a measure of the size of the economy being governed. What you want to keep an eye on is the total inflation-adjusted 'value' of the economy, if this starts reducing then that's not good.

It depends on which country. Your country might be that way but in the U.S. it isn’t. In the U.S., 90% of the money is created by banks via loans and 10% of the money is created by the federal reserve via a small variety of open market operations such as the adjustment of federal interest rate. All USD created is tied to debt somewhere of some kind. This system gives the currency both scarcity as well as demand.

All of the debt has to be paid back but it can’t all be paid back or else there would be no currency in circulation.

One of the biggest reasons the USD is so strong is because the federal reserve is distinct, separate, and independent from the government. Most governments in history have eventually moved to influence or take over their central bank so they can spend even more wastefully & recklessly than before. America was designed with a unique separation of powers. Other’s weren’t. All of the rest of the world’s paper currencies have been worse to hold over the last 30 years and possibly more.

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