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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

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Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#261

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mikepurvis wrote: post #223
svachalek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've felt that gut punch all the time. Seems to happen with every technology. In the early days of GPS, people would ask for directions to the gas station then pull it up on their phone map and go "yeah, you're right!" So thanks for wasting my time, insulting my integrity, and killing my faith in humanity all in 3 words. And if you really need two opinions, it's so easy to just reverse the situation, "my GPS say…

I remember fifteen years ago I would tell people leaving my house "oh yeah, ignore your GPS that tells you to go that way, just down the road here and left turn; that'll get you on the highway much faster." Nowadays obviously Google Maps gets it right, but it was interesting that period where you had to actively preempt everyone's instinct to just rely on the little table hanging off their dashboard.

there was an institution my son went to for therapy for his various handicaps, and one of the major taxi routing solutions in Denmark had the route wrong, I think the one based on Google maps actually, so when you called for a taxi it always drove nearly a block away that you had to walk through a couple of back alleys to get to. And then the taxi driver would call me up and complain I wasn't there, and I had to guide them to the place where they actually had to be at over the phone.

Sometimes they were not capable of following the instructions though.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#262

Post by no_multitudes »

teiferer wrote: post #147
foolinaround wrote: post #138

Beautifully written essay. The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so). The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output? Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know…

> Beautifully written essay. Agreed! Great flow, structure, no BS, really good! I would wager this didn't use LLM help to be written. Though if I'm wrong I'd really like to know and would be very impressed. (And if I'm right then the article is an illustration of its own message. You don't learn how to write such essays without having practised it for many years without opting for the easy way of letting the LLM do t…

It was definitely written with significant LLM assistance. It's very obvious, and the essay is not good.

> The Waymo effect: how AI is *quietly* making research less collaborative

> The Waymo arrived with the serene confidence of a machine that has never once worried about where to find parking, and I climbed into the back seat, glanced instinctively at the driver’s seat to say hello, and found myself nodding politely at an empty chair.

> No obligation to make conversation. No silent negotiation over the radio. A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger. The car was quiet, smooth and entirely undemanding.

> The collaborator’s inconvenience, in other words, is *not a bug* in the collaboration; it largely is the collaboration. The value of another mind *lies exactly in the ways* it refuses to be an extension of your own.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#263

Post by mpalmer »

Unrelated to AI, who is actually stressing about having to talk to drivers? In my experience most drivers are perfectly happy not chatting. This seems like a truly fake concern.

Yet the piece literally says

    Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone
Which is simply wrong.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#264

Post by no_multitudes »

teiferer wrote: post #166
scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct. I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I…

Have you also scanned earlier work of the author with pangram to establish a baseline? Pangram is not without problems.

Can you give some examples of verifiable pangram false positives?

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#265

Post by away0g »

Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

I remember when google on your phone was new. The common complaints was, look at me while im talking, dont just fact check me. or something along those lines.

Its interesting to see the same shaped problem come up again. we didnt really figure out a solution to this, the world just kind of absorbed it as normal.

how long before this is absorbed.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#266

Post by navaed01 »

I agree with a lot of the article, but I want to posit that LLMs can encourage more human interaction by providing people with an information foundation that they might not have gained otherwise. What do I mean… In the past 2 weeks I’ve had human conversations about fleet management and flood insurance that were a direct result of being able to quickly explore these topics with LLMS first.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#267

Post by no_multitudes »

PunchTornado wrote: post #148
scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct. I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I…

Why trust pangram? What are their accuracy scores in the wild? Ai detection is notoriously difficult.

AI detection in long-form content is a problem well-suited to training a classifier model. We have tons of verifiably-not-AI text from before 2022, and you can create tons of verifiably-AI text. As language drifts over the next few decades, it may get more difficult. But right now it is quite a manageable problem for languages with large pre-2022 text corpora available online.

The reason why AI detection tools other than Pangram are awful is because they are not really trying to solve the problem -- they just want to appear good enough to convince people to use them.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#268

Post by fidotron »

chunky1994 wrote: post #258
fidotron wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour. Smart people can do very non smart things when they feel their status as smartest-person-in-the-room is threatened, which is the entire point. > There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “sm…

I was responding to you in the context of the GP. > The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it…

> You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

> Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement.

But it is exactly what you are doing in the exact quote of yours you even put there.

I am being nice, but it's quite clear you are a near perfect example of this stereotype (if actually a relatively polite one), right down to the wall-of-text when cornered.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#269

Post by ripe »

nicce wrote: post #100
meowface wrote: post #4

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

I think that in the end it does not matter, anymore. It is inevitable that most of the text now and in the future is at least reviewed by LLM. We should criticize whether text is poorly written, inaccurate, wastes words to get to the point and anything like. Saying that it is "written by LLM" just bypasses this and is not useful and misses the point. AI written text can be really good if used correctly. Criticize the…

> saying it is "written by LLM" is not useful and misses the point.

It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#270

Post by no_multitudes »

teiferer wrote: post #233
meowface wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. I use LLMs all day every day. I think they're great. I just don't like humans who put their name to what an LLM did.

> You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion. You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.

They were pointing out that "It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research." does not sound like LLM-generated text.

It would sound kind of LLM-y if you had said "It's not an anti-Waymo article. It's an article about how assistive technology is quietly degrading research."

(Of course, the correct approach to detecting AI is not counting LLM-isms, but feeding long-form text through a classifier model and picking up statistical correlations that are more in-distribution with LLM text than human text.)

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