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The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances
- tao_oat 5mo agohttps://archive.is/c2sBh https://archive.is/c2sBh
- phlummox 5mo ago... is there any reason why I shouldn't be visiting Aphyr's site directly?
- DareTheDev 5mo agoBlocked in the UK. “Online safety act”
- GavinAnderegg 5mo agoIs this something you're seeing personally? If so, how do you know it's because of the Online Safety Act? This is a personal blog and it doesn't seem to have any adult content that I can find. The homepage of the site isn't blocked when I check it here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/check https://www.blocked.org.uk/check
- steveklabnik 5mo agohttps://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-with-nginx https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...
- GavinAnderegg 5mo agoThanks for this! Seems like a bold stance… but the Online Safety Act also seems like a poor piece of legislation.
- rwmj 5mo agoIt is, but Kyle's "protest" is making absolutely no difference.
- zdragnar 5mo agoWhat protest? If the site is illegal in the UK, he has three options: 1) add age verification to comply 2) cease operating in the UK by blocking traffic 3) operate in violation of the law, making travel to anywhere the UK has jurisdiction dangerous I don't think he's intending on changing UK society by blocking their traffic because, as you point out, that's not a good way to effect change.
- tom_ 5mo agoIt tells you when you visit.
- multjoy 5mo agoThe author is blocking UK ip addresses, presumably out of principle rather than because they’d fall foul of it.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoD^HLying is easy, it's comedy that's hard...
- Leomuck 5mo agoSo basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class divide between rich and poor. Who are we to trust in the future? Not big companies, not the state, not LLMs. Time to organize around groups and collectives that we know we can trust and that we know have our wellbeing in mind.
- sassymuffinz 5mo agoSelf inflating nipple shaped balloons that generate their own lift without any helium would be an incredible achievement but that doesn't mean it's useful beyond being novel. Chatbots are ultimately just predictive text on steroids, and only complete fools would base their business, or entire economy around it.
- throwanem 5mo agoThe invention you describe, by making possible cargo transport without dependency on either a supply of fuel or the vagaries of weather, would revolutionize the global economy to an extent little short of utopian. You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.
- sassymuffinz 5mo agoGemini says it’s a genius idea and I should patent it.
- throwanem 5mo agoI can't argue with that!
- groundzeros2015 5mo ago
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoThis is doomerism. Yes, everything will get worse. But everything will also get better. Such is progress. (for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know) Most of these annoyances are also things that existed before AI, and will continue to exist after, because consumerist capitalism. The good little obedient consumers get abused because they don't stand up for themselves. Customer service is an enfuriating maze? Yeah, because you voted with your dollars (and political indifference) to allow companies to make customer service (the thing you pay for) worse. We bring these problems on ourselves. It's pointless to complain if you aren't willing to do anything to change it. (And if you think you can't change it, there's other nations to look at, as well as the fact that you live in a democracy - for now - unlike the rest of the world) Hell, we already have companies whose sole purpose is to manage your subscriptions for you because you're too lazy to do it yourself. You could look at this and say, man, the world is terrible! Or you could look at this and say, man, how great is my life that I can not only subscribe to a lot of things without going bankrupt, but I have extra cash left over to pay a company to manage my subscriptions? Don't let the hedonic treadmill and complacency trick you into A) accepting a worse life, or B) convincing yourself your life is bad when it's actually better than most people's.
- duskdozer 5mo ago>(for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know) As the author said: >I suspect that like the job market, everyone will wind up paying massive “AI” companies to manage the drudgery they created.
- Scholmo 5mo agoIt could also lead to a massive crash of capitalism and reevaluation of how our society functions. It could lead to significant progress in every single research area. I'm at least very impressed about the amount of open models and that it doesn't hold up that the gap between public and private diverges massivly. Public is probably one year behind.
- smitty1e 5mo agoSo, providing actual customer service becomes a market differentiator? "Yes, we cost more, but your get what you pay for" can be a good play.
- zer00eyz 5mo agoEverything that is old is new again. Payment processing, is better than it was in 2000, but still not good. Micropayments: this is obnoxiously expensive to do. Discovery, and discoverability: again here we have better but not good solutions (and many of the ones that were once good are enshitified). Pricing: this is a problem everywhere, and frankly we need the law to change in a way that is pro consumer. Publishing prices, disclosure of fees, in both services and for payment processing (that 3 percent back from visa looks a lot less attractive when it's part of a 5 percent mark up). Customer service: well there are already companies promoting models where they cut you off and send you into a black hole (google is a prime example). Good customer service will become a differentiator, and maybe a "paid for" service as well.
- pessimizer 5mo ago> Good customer service will become a differentiator This does not matter without antitrust, which is why customer service became bad in the first place. 30 years ago, the low quality of customer service we complain about now simply didn't exist, at any size or professional level of business, and never had. If a company back then had the customer service of the average company now, or even the average government agency now, people would have suspected that it was a covert front for criminals or spies. If a company doesn't have to compete, it can cut everything until it only has the ghost of a product and a billing department. You don't boycott monopolies, monopolies boycott you. If three companies put you on a list to not have internet, phone service, a bank account or a credit card, etc., you just can't have them. You've become a European human rights judge.
- ixtli 5mo agoExcellent essay. I see some of this is already happening imo
- KronisLV 5mo ago> ML models will hurt innocent people. Lots of blaming LLMs but I think the root cause lies elsewhere, I’m not even sure whether dismissing it as “capitalism” or “profit motives” would do it justice, because in general it feels more like the world that we live in lacks humanity. Even in a capitalist world, a company could take a stance and decide not to purposefully screw people over, but in the world that we live in instead they look for ways to better screw over people and extract more money from them. It doesn’t matter whether your customer support is handled by someone from India, a crappy telephone tree or some voice model, when the incentive is the same - to do the bare minimum for customer “support” (in practice, just getting you to fuck off). Same for handling insurance claims and “dynamic pricing” of things - it doesn’t matter whether it’s some proprietary algorithm or just an LLM making crap up when the goal is to screw you over. Blaming “AI” for all of this would be barking up the wrong tree (without that tech they’d just find other ways), though one can definitely acknowledge that this technology provides another convenient scapegoat, same as how you can lay employees off and just say cause it’s because of AI when in actuality it’s just greed and wanting to make your books look better.
- jfengel 5mo agoIn a capitalist world, the company that does decide to screw people over gets rich and the one that doesn't goes out of business. It would be great if people chose not to do business with the former, but many simply do not care. They may think only other people get screwed. They may not take the time to think about it, especially if the company spends a ton of money obfuscating their misbehavior. Quite a few actively defend the right of companies to screw them. Technology multiplies that like a lever. We weren't prepared for capitalism before LLMs and we're massively under-prepared now.
- duskdozer 5mo agoA lot of this has been going on for a long time and I've been sensitive to it. LLMs may not be solely responsible but they're a massive escalation.
- intended 5mo agoThe articles didn’t blame LLMs, they talked about how they would get used, precisely through the lens of systems, incentives and culture.
- petermcneeley 5mo ago> Since LLMs are unpredictable and vulnerable to injection attacks, customer service machines must also have limited power Haha yes. I interacted with a bank one. It was like press 5 for mortgages but with a text to speech front end. At the end of the day the LLM can be tricked into doing anything.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoI wonder if there's also less of a stigma and sense of wrongdoing about tricking an LLM versus tricking an employee We intuitively know that an employee will be punished and may get fired if we trick them. Many of us won't try to trick human employees as a result, because we would feel bad if they had bad consequences as a result of our trickery There is likely no such hesitation around tricking LLMs. I know I personally wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Mostly because any computerized customer service process is annoying so anything I can do to limit my time dealing with it is a win in my books
- solid_fuel 5mo agoI have no moral qualms about tricking an LLM, but I would not be surprised if it gets called a violation of the CFAA in the near future.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoI hope not. It would be a real shame to offload corporate responsibility onto their customers
- solid_fuel 5mo agoGreat for shareholders, though.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5mo agoRegarding companies trying to block any contact with customer service and adding endless AI hurdles: In some countries, having a reachable means of contact is legally required. Is there a NOYB-style organization that specializes in enforcing this right (suing companies on behalf of consumers)? For the "bureaucracy has royally fucked up and doesn't want to fix it", if it is something that can be fixed with money and isn't time sensitive (e.g. you need a refund rather than get the airline to actually provide you the ticket you already paid for and want to fly this weekend): In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue. I hope that these resolution methods become more common - I think the tools to fight enshittification often already exist, we just don't use them enough. A welcome side effect would, of course, be that this would impose a real cost on the enshittifiers, creating an incentive to provide proper support.
- xp84 5mo ago> In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue. Idk where we fall on the scale of “effectiveness” vs our peers, but I do read more people’s stories of Small Claims that are positive than negative. But I’ve never used this. I suspect it would be difficult to press a claim against a random large “company” just based on how slippery their identities even are. “Oh, Apple Inc. isn’t responsible for that, it’s a different subsidiary based in Ireland for tax reasons. Go serve them.” I think most people would have to be out more money (maybe more than the S.C. limit?) before being motivated to engage with the chronically overextended legal system, sadly. Also, if the effective tools do exist, count on American companies using the American bribery-based political system to change the laws to dull those tools or to eliminate them. Again, if you live in some consumer-friendly country good for you, I’m just saying how it plays out in this one society. I’ll stipulate that it’s all our fault blah blah blah.
- vyr 5mo agohave worked closely with customer support teams, can confirm that the goal of any technical improvements that go in front of CS agents is to reduce ticket volume, and thus costs. of course they measure retention and satisfaction but ticket volume is always the big one. chatbots were big for this long before LLMs existed. a fun side effect is that CS is also an early warning system for companies, so when you make it harder to get through to a human, you start throwing out info on your users' pain points. of course this only matters if people have a choice about whether to use your product, so that's gotta be an upside for insurance companies, etc.
- Loughla 5mo agoCan I not shop for other insurance companies? I specifically chose my provider because I know there's an office I can call to talk to my agent or his secretary. The moment I have to interact with a chatbot, I take my business to someone else.
- gregates 5mo agoI had a fun experience with my ISP where their chat bot couldn't help me (of course it couldn't, I don't call for "did you try turning it off and on again" problems), so it escalated me to a human agent. Said human agent was very obviously copy-pasting LLM output. I could tell because (1) the responses were nearly identical to what Claude already told me when I asked it before calling and (2) every once in a while I would get an uncharacteristically brief reply, without capitalization or punctuation, in Indian English. I haven't a had a good experience since AT&T bought my previous ISP and forced me to switch to a different subsidiary.
- slumberlust 5mo agoJust look at the difference between Amazon and Chewy support. One actively obfuscates how to talk/chat with a human; the other has someone knowledgeable pick up after one telephony prompt.
- jerf 5mo agoI don't need to conduct 1000 transactions per day. I don't forsee a world in which it will be some sort of fatal inconvenience to need to approve all purchases. I certainly don't plan on ever just handing over my credit card to an LLM, due to its fundamental architectural issues with injection, and I still don't anticipate handing it over to any future AI architecture anytime soon because I struggle to imagine what benefits could possibly be worth the risk of taking down such a basic, cheap barrier. All that stuff about support, though, inevitable.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo agoAgreed. My only real complaint with this article is it frames needing to argue with a machine as though this is a new, freshly annoying thing. I already do this constantly. Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on the line who can figure out what's gone wrong and sort it. The only people benefiting from cutting that down are the scum class (combo of shareholders and executives) and who's shocked, really. Everything is being ruined nearly at all times to benefit the scum class.
- gdulli 5mo agoAt least phone trees are deterministic and there's still (usually) an option to get to a person for matters that aren't covered by the multiple choice options. Talking to AI is a much worse experience and the hope of the industry is that there won't need to be a human as a fallback anymore because (they believe) the AI is intelligent enough to handle anything.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoI'm surprised to find so many people who consider human-based customer support a good experience. I wasted an hour on the phone last month with a series of polite support agents who I'm sure were wonderful people in their personal lives. They kept saying they'd like to try one more thing, making me wait 5 minutes (just short enough that I can't get anything done in the interim!), and then asking for one more pointless permutation of the workflow that did not work because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there. Talking to an LLM would have let me realize a lot faster that we weren't getting anywhere.
- kevg123 5mo agoI sent the entire series by Aphyr [1] to some friends. Two of them, independently, responded with a variant of, "TLDR, can you give a summary?" I chat with these friends a lot but I rarely send articles that I suggest they read and that I think are profound, so I expected them to read it. These are smart people that have a history of reading lots of books. They are both huge AI proponents now and use AI for nearly everything now. Debates on various topics with them used to be rich; now, they're shallow and they just send me AI summaries of points they're clearly just predisposed to. Their attention spans are dwindling. [1] https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is-lies.pdf https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is...
- tim333 5mo agoSmart people usually have competing ways of spending time and may not prioritize an eight part dissertation on AI being a bit annoying?
- kevg123 5mo agoIt's more of a meta point to me. I get that this series isn't landing for some people but the meta-observation is that given something of roughly equal substantiveness as before, these friends' motivations for long form content and discussion seem to have atrophied, perhaps largely due to the addition of the AI summary reality cipher to their lives.
- skrebbel 5mo agoFriends don’t send friends AI summaries
- grvdrm 5mo agoCoworkers, too.
- apsurd 5mo agomaybe it means they were never really as smart as you thought? Not meant to be snarky. It's been two decades now since my first wide-eyed entry into the workforce, moving for new opportunities, meeting new people. it's been great. There's a lot of smart people out there. I also realize that many people I seen as smart had more access to more content then i did. i still appreciated their sharing , it was enlightening to me. But after 20 years, I think back and it's literally quoting things from smart youtube videos. and regurgitating the latest thought leaders. We all do this, but like you, what's meaningful to me is the chewing, the dissection and synthesis. coming together to share different perspectives and so on. i've had those friends too! it's just not 1:1
- Scholmo 5mo agoDon't agree with this. LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. So many people call customer support for issues they could in theory fix themselves. If that LLM system can understand me well enough, its an okay interface. In worst case you have to escalate anyway. My mum actually told me that she talked to some AI. And yes normal systems are also not correct often enough. With AI/LLM software will get cheaper which should incresase quality overall. I dont think ai/llm in this case will change anything. Relevant change will happen due to the fact that humans can be replaced by AI/LLMs. It was not even imaginable a few years back how a good ai system would even look like. Translaters lost their jobs, basic arists lost their jobs. Small contracts for basic things are gone. The restaurant poster no one cares? AI. The website translation for some small business? no one cares.
- davidclark 5mo ago>LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoYou're on a forum with a disproportionate number of people who are trying to profit from AI and have an interest in promoting that it's a worthwhile time and resource investment. It is a different universe than other places outside this bubble. And it's a one day old account.
- Scholmo 5mo agoAs mentioned in my other comment, I just spend too much time on hn so thats why its a new account. I do not profit from AI but I think the cat is out of the bag. We have companies like google who has so much money, R&D in AI is just something they can afford. We then have other companies like Microsoft who have to do AI because Google is doing it. And then we have whole countries who fight the AI race. USA vs. China (and in theory EU but Mistral is not making waves eh?). So for now, the progress is staggering fast and I do believe whatever critisism people have, you need to spend relevant time following and keeping up with AI to take the right action in time. Decisions regarding long term investment, using AI tools properly instead of getting fired or even funding your own small company and filling a niche. From a pure nerd pov: Its crazy! Srsly i can generate images and videos and i can talk to a computer and i can generate songs and .... I mean I wished to be alive when Linus asked on a mailing list about people being interested in Linux but this is now something im alive for. And it solves plenty of problems for me i haven't had any good solutions. Especially the quality of parsing random texsts into semantic json.
- Hoasi 5mo agoThe erosion and further diffusion of responsibility is the trend that worries me the most, since it’s already how all mid-size organisations, businesses and institutions alike, operate by design, and LLMs are likely to make that much worse.
- bitexploder 5mo agoJust need your own LLMs to exhaust them. The future seems like it will be owned by whoever can automate with LLMs in whatever problem domain there is. My agent will be in touch with yours, I guess.
- Lerc 5mo agoA COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION —IBM internal training, 1979 It took me a while to realise that the premise is saying the same thing as the reason why we have so many "Computer says no" experiences today. The conclusion only follows if you want someone to be accountable. If you want to avoid being accountable, computers should make all management decisions. This has nothing to do with AI other than it provides another mechanism to do that. People saying "I'd love to help you but the computer won't let me do that" has been happening for years now. Websites develop abusive patterns because A/B testing lets a process decide based on the goal you want, It doesn't measure the repercussions so you have made no decision to allow them. Management read it as A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE THERE CAN BE NO LIABILITY IF COMPUTERS MAKE ALL MANAGEMENT DECISIONS
- wpm 5mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds computah says noooooo
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYou're misinterpreting the implication. A better phrasing might be: A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, since all management decisions must have accountability, a computer must never make them.
- agentultra 5mo agoTo lie requires recognition of the truth and an intention to deceive. LLM’s don’t have such abilities. They are systems that generate plausible sequences of symbols based on training inputs, alignments, reinforcement, and inference. These systems don’t know or care what truth is and therefore cannot lie. It’s already bad. I’m not looking forward to the future. These systems are terrible. It’s a future without people that they want for some reason. I’d rather deal with people incompetent, tired, annoyed people than an LLM.
- fn-mote 5mo agoIll-thought out logic. The company that deployed the LLM is lying to you. The people who made that decision are the ones who are culpable. We both agree that it’s terrible. I think it’s important to have an enforcement mechanism to force companies to do what they are responsible for doing. An Anti-Kafka Law, so to speak.
- agentultra 5mo agoAn important distinction to make, and I whole heartedly agree. It’s not LLMs replacing workers, it’s people. People who have a lot of money and don’t sell their labour for a paycheque. And the systems that compel them to such actions.
- Myrmornis 5mo agoI read the first couple of posts in the series. The essay is full of criticism of LLMs, and in a couple of places the author distances himself, as if he himself isn't using them ("some people I respect tell me that..."). It's certainly worth discussing the fact that the entire industry is starting to outsource large amounts of our thinking and writing work to non-sentient statistical algorithms, but this discussion needs to honestly confront the extent to which they are successfully completing useful tasks today.
- fandorin 5mo ago„Agentic commerce means handing your credit card to a Large Language Model” - this is simply not true. LLMs/Agents will never get any credit/debit card details, they will be just an interface.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoFull quote: > People are very excited about “agentic commerce”. Agentic commerce means handing your credit card to a Large Language Model, giving it access to the Internet, telling it to buy something, and calling it in a loop until something exciting happens. I think you're confusing this for the other side of things. The article talks about how some people already use OpenClaw and the variations, give them access to bunch of stuff including cards to purchase things (sometimes virtual and limited cards), I think that's what the article talks about when they say "agentic commerce". Obviously a intentional simplification in the language the author uses, but I think it gets the point across at least.
- fandorin 5mo agoOk, in this case I misunderstood author's point here. "Agentic commerce" for me is a framework that networks (MC, Visa) and other big players in the ecosystem are working on. So it's far from "i'll give my credit cards details to openclaw and hope for the best". Obviously I know that a lot of people do that, unfortunately...
- hn92726819 5mo agoMillions of users, and you think exactly zero of them will hand over their credit card info?
- bdangubic 5mo agomy wife is one, so definitely not zero (she uses cards from privacy.com so there’s that…)
- ufocia 5mo agoAI on AI warfare
- _doctor_love 5mo agoI've been enjoying these articles by 'aphyr and I think they raise important points. Primarily though, they read to me as polemics of a curiously American nature. The pattern goes something like this: - this development is bad - companies will be unrestrained in their use of this development - there will be no rules so they can do whatever they want - we are all fucked as a result But then...propose that we make some laws to put rules around this stuff, also known as regulations and everybody goes "whoa hold up hold up hold up...I dunno about that part." Dear friends - America has always been this way. Study your 19th and 20th century history. Companies will exploit the shit out of us unless we put some rules in place to prevent it. Yes, that might mean making less money in the short term as regulations cause friction. But in the long term it means we can have a better and actually livable society. (For what it's worth I'm an American and not an uppity European or Australian taking potshots from across the pond; no offense to Euros or Aussies intended, love you guys)
- SilverElfin 5mo agoIt’s not that people are against regulations totally, but that the structure of society is broken. People with wealth, including corporations, can influence and control everything with money. Legislators are easily bribed. Lawsuits are expensive and take years. It’s hard to make anything happen unless you’re already rich or connected enough to access the right people. The real issue is new amendments are needed. But that’s hard. You need 75% of states ratifying. And that seems impossible today on any topic.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoWhat regulations would you suggest?
- intended 5mo agoI’d andd another layer - for American tech workers, regulation also reduces profits. This hurts salaries, stocks options and career growth. Incentives make the world go round, so even if people recognize the issue, they would rather it become someone else’s problem, than willingly harm their own future.
- scoofy 5mo ago
- elzbardico 5mo agoThe worst thing is that non-technical people, and actually a lot of technical people without experience in ML, will tend to overstimate the capabilities of those systems, neither the nuances of probabilitic thinking to properly integrate their outputs in a decision. Remember that the polygraph still exists, now we will be dealing with a massive portion of the decision makers will treat as artificial inteligence not in the technical sense we use, but as real inteligence, maybe even super-inteligence.
- Planktonne 5mo agoI don't think that's an accurate description of what's happening here. With previous technology, sure, but the breathless overstatement of AI capabilities is coming primarily from 'technical' people who should know better. The average person on the street is familiar with consumer-facing AI but doesn't think it's really alive/magic/the solution to everything. Our supposed best-and-brightest are the ones flogging the horse.
- gs17 5mo ago> Perhaps we’ll see distributed boycotts where many people deploy personal models to force Burger King’s models to burn through tokens at a fantastic rate. Given how many people hate AI in general, I'm surprised there hasn't been anything like this happening. They could even get around the irony of using "AI" themselves, I bet low-tech language models like Markov chains could provide sufficient time wasting potential (I'd love to see it done with an old fashioned AIML chatbot). Asymmetric chatbot warfare.
- delusional 5mo agoIf your complaints about AI are largely about the industrial energy use, the poor quality of service, and the displacement of human labor, wasting more CPU time doesn't seem like a viable or useful protest. The lesson Burger King would take away from your DDoS protest isn't that they should provide better customer service, but that they shouldn't provide any customer service. You'd be giving them free cover to blame consumers for making customer service too expensive.
- wpm 5mo agoWhy would Burger King's competitors leave such an obvious competitive edge on the table?
- gs17 5mo agoI've interacted with some anti-AI people who genuinely would prefer the "no customer service" world to even a "good AI customer service" world. They're a small minority, sure, but this sort of attack wouldn't need a huge group.
- elzbardico 5mo agoMost people who hate AI have been completely dis-enfranchised by the system. The media won't amplificate their voices, any viable political leader that is seem as threat will be completely and utterly destroyed by the parties and the PAC machine still on the primaries. It is an incredibly vexing situation to see whatever you're an AI hater or enthusiast. I, for one, welcome our trillion parameters multiple layers overlords.
- jcgrillo 5mo agoAt various previous companies I've worked at product managers, executives, and engineers love bandying about the idea of "building for nontechnical users" as a way to make their widgets more "friendly". But it's just another way to otherize and denigrate "those people" who are the out group. They might, through a metacognitive defect or simple sociopathy, actually believe they're "doing good" by considering the poor creature's plight and making compassionate decisions on their behalf. But it's all crap. All they're actually doing is confirming their biases. LLMs are the divine nectar to these people, an enshittification accelerant par excellence.
- morgengold 5mo agoMy father just changed his car key battery with the help of ai and he likes that. He also consulted it about about car insurance regulations and he got more out of it than searching the web himself. For most simple mainstream questions I just ask ai instead of googling shitty results. Most of the time ai is good enough and often better than the status ante. People do not care if it is a stupid token prediction machine as long as the job gets done.
- dalmo3 5mo agoUntil you take a baby to the vaccine clinic, the nurse googles which vaccine to give at his age, and blindly trusts the highlighted AI snippet at the top. Not a fictitious example.
- forinti 5mo agoI saw a doctor use AI to do some maths recently. I checked it and it was right, but trusting LLMs to do statistics is not a good idea.
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoSure, but that's an incredible level of incompetence, that I can only see would be expose otherwise outside of AI use. The entire list of what vaccines to give to what age group could fit on a single piece of paper.
- wpm 5mo agoAnd much of what people use AI for now could be easily done without it. How many steps of a Claude Code /plan are just running basic ls commands, all for a few thousand tokens? The entire thing reeks of laziness and incompetence. It's neat an all but its a giant sucking maw that is threatening to gobble up whats left of anything good.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gtowey 5mo ago
- gib444 5mo agoHe talks in the future tense about things already happening for some time. I've had phone systems lie about talking to a bot. > Companies are now trying to divert support requests into chats with LLMs More than trying they are doing it very successfully and for a long time now I do agree things can still get 10x worse than even the current state though > When you talk to a person, there’s a “there” there—someone who, if you’re patient and polite, can actually understand what’s going on I've found they have been trained to be machine-like for many years now and not actually help. They focus on empathy and understanding and caring about your needs...and diverting your attention away from actually resolving the issue. Here's an example recently I experienced: I complained to my bank about how they show refunds on the app. I got a call from a lovely sounding lady who used a comforting tone to ask if I had any special needs she needs to be aware of so she can "provide extra support" . At beginning I made it clear I'm not chasing a particular refund but rather raising a specific complaint about how refunds are shown in the app. 4 times she mentioned a specific refund assuring me that it's been refunded, ignoring everything I said at the beginning. She explained how refunds work. She explained how pending transactions work (all off topic). She explained 3 times about how they can't (won't) create a feedback loop and begged my permission to close off the complaint, saying she hopes I can understand. That was all a very dressed up "I'll pass your feedback to the PM. Thanks" but it was whole ridiculous long phone call trying to make me feel "heard" and I came away feeling like a 15 year old
- christkv 5mo agoMeh I'm going to run my own agent to argue with their agents. Endless patience.
- semiinfinitely 5mo agothis guy will probably never stop yapping after having gotten just a little bit of attention on his original post
- semiinfinitely 5mo agocase and point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379
- calvinmorrison 5mo agoWe are inseparable from technology. Technology which we cannot opt out of to live in a society. We do not get to pick and chose what types of technology we engage in. Dr. K predicted this decades ago and he was right.
- bdangubic 5mo agowe are 100% separable from technology and we can “opt out” everything we want to opt out, every technology use is by choice and convenience and not necessity. my Dad does not have a mobile or internet and is doing just fine, the only “technology” that exists in his life in TV and a landline. so absolutely 100% of the technology you engage with is by your own choice and absolutely nothing else
- calvinmorrison 5mo agoabsolutely not. Look at how roads and driving have shaped our entire lives in America. If by opting out you mean you can live alone in a hut, yes sure. If you want to participate meaningfully in society, no.
- abcde666777 5mo agoI've found these posts to be excellent - wonderful reads really. Props to the author.
- Barbing 5mo ago"That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was On Purpose." I knew that one time I needed a free Sam's Club membership for one thing and they kept on dropping me...
- siliconc0w 5mo agoI'm excited for the AI lawsuits and litigation. It used to be squarely in the domain of the well financed but I can see the legal system absolutely inundated with AI generated legal slop.
- ramon156 5mo ago- Use AI for Knowledge holes, fact check them, then accept them as solved. - Use agents to write code that is defined in a spec, review manually, accept them as solved. Nothing more, nothing less
- AtlasBarfed 5mo agoSucky customer service is a direct economic function of reduced competition and increase monopolization / cartel dynamics.
- ongytenes 5mo agoI was blocked from reading this article. I was intrigued enough from the summary to consider reading his other parts from the series. He chose to block me based on the state I live in.