7 ms·

People Do Not Yearn for Automation

121 points by icco 5mo ago

ewean 5mo ago
https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/546f1c3ef20d8a8ed69c9f479378d834 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/546f1c3ef20d8a8ed69c9f479... https://gist.github.com/wowopalmoil/eb2b6512b7b046a9dec1611d3066fa3e https://gist.github.com/wowopalmoil/eb2b6512b7b046a9dec1611d...
ferwe 5mo ago
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E-Reverance 5mo ago
Maybe a nitpicky HN comment, but why are we lumping the term automation with very recent grievances about certain kinds of automation
- kristianc 5mo ago
  The article literally draws that distinction in the first paragraph.
  - E-Reverance 5mo ago
    It does? " Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time. "
- pixl97 5mo ago
  I mean, even going back, people had all kinds of problems with all kinds of automations, e.g. Luddites and the subsequent starving in the streets. I mean, I would think the opposite it the truth. Other than a few masochist CEOs, most people don't like having to work for a living to ensure they don't starve and are homeless. It's just in the current paradigm it's what we have do to. And because we have to do it, people get really nervous when rich people attempt to replace human work with automation. Not because we won't have to work, but because we will have to starve.
  - E-Reverance 5mo ago
    People not wanting their jobs be automated is different from not yearning for automation as a principle. Most people want or (at least don't mind) elevators, tap water, dishwashers, traffic lights, electrical fuses, sliding doors, etc. Its a very general term
  - 5mo ago
slantaclaus 5mo ago
The dream of automation will never die
- Insanity 5mo ago
  And our automations dream of electric sheep :). I think there's a more general negative sentiment against AI (a specific type of automation) in recent months. I mean, people are trying to burn down Altman's house. The average person who follows tech news might be more reluctant about automation than before. But there'll always be technologists who push for automation at any cost.
preommr 5mo ago
Obviously not. People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility. Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.
- E-Reverance 5mo ago
  Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if journalist are getting high on their own supply of resentment and fear mongering
- rogue7 5mo ago
  Agreed for cheaper prices and more flexibility. At least this is what we think we want. But do we actually want it ? A computer 40 years ago was way more expensive than now. How did people do it ? They managed. How do we do it now ? We manage, similarly. Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe. I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ? - More efficient for some things, less efficient for others. - Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related. - More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though). Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem. If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.
fmajid 5mo ago
People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.
- ironmagma 5mo ago
  Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
  - _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
    The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing. Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
- watwut 5mo ago
  Majority of AI use people encounter has zero to do with "automating drudgery" and a lot to do with "producing slop fast and cheap".
  - harvey9 5mo ago
    I don't think those are always different things. Imagine writing copy for a store catalogue. It pays the bills but probably isn't anyone's dream job.
    - 5mo ago
RigelKentaurus 5mo ago
A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
- Lutzb 5mo ago
  Working in IT and AI related fields I made the opposite observation. Taking as HR an example, professionals there wanted to keep the boring reporting tasks and automate the human part, e.g. career guidance, mediation etc.. At the time I could not understand the reason why. In hindsight it was a reward driven decision. Human to human interaction is rarely instantly rewarded. Producing reports on the other hand is measurable and mostly rewarded right away.
  - greedo 5mo ago
    This is compounded by many managers not understanding the details of what their direct reports actually do. I've had so many supervisors in my career who just have no concept of what I really do in IT, though it's pretty obvious to me and my coworkers. So when it comes to review time, I'm always having to walk them through what I actually do. Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
- gyanchawdhary 5mo ago
  thank you, I was hoping to write this but your comment saved me from typing it :)
- wavemode 5mo ago
  > A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written. In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load. > The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.") In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.
rogue7 5mo ago
Personally, it depends. If I could automate taking the trash out, I would do probably want to do it (not sure though). But what remains when everything is automated ? Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need. Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.
- ArekDymalski 5mo ago
  > But what remains when everything is automated? The answer has been perfectly captured in this czechoslovakian cartoon made in 1984. https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared
  - SyneRyder 5mo ago
    I shouldn't admit it, but when you described a czechoslovakian cartoon about automation, my first thought went straight to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI&t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI&t=14s
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - euroderf 5mo ago
    There is also the film Zardoz.
mft_ 5mo ago
I want us to automate food production and distribution. I want us to automate creation of building materials and creation of buildings. I want us to automate power generation, and see the marginal cost of power drop to zero. I want us to automate clean transport. I want us to automate cleaning up the planet.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
  I'd like to not die of Baumol's Cost Disease along the way, though.
  - Legend2440 5mo ago
    Baumol's cost disease also benefits you, because it makes your wages go up even if you haven't increased productivity.
    - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
      Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
- kilroy123 5mo ago
  Same here. Then let's automate building vast O'Neill cylinders and habitats we can live in.
  - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
    Why
    - Dig1t 5mo ago
      Why not? Humans are awesome and should colonize the universe. There is much science to do and there are many things to build.
uriahlight 5mo ago
Ahh yes. AI is polling worse than ICE. Doesn't mean much since ICE would be polling quite well with much of the country. Typical low-quality journalism.
agentbonnybb 5mo ago
[dead]
pizzly 5mo ago
I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing. Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials. Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.
- greazy 5mo ago
  Automated drug discovery is already a thing. The proceeding steps are the issue, clinical trials, formulation, safety testing, etc, economies of scale etc. True automation of scientific research requires true AI. I'm not really sure why tech people keep suggesting scientists aren't incorporating the latest tech. We are all about automation. The issue is funding.
deterministic 5mo ago
Take away automation from our factories and farmers and see how quickly civilisation will fall apart.
smarm52 5mo ago
> The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. This is sophomoric. This person is the "editor in chief" and I'm guessing that no one had the job security to tell them that this article was silly on the face of it. The title is good rage bait: "People Do Not Yearn for Automation". Obviously false, and it draws in the readers that want to say "Nuh uh!". But the meat of the article is on how the seeming disconnect between technological elites and other people has lead to them touting AI when they should consider other alternatives. This premise is shown to be dubious by a statistics in the article: > In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI ... > That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. So, a simple question, why are so many people using something they claim to hate? Doesn't that spark a bit of interest in the author? No? They would very much like to blame industry leaders, rather than take a more nuanced view. That said industry leaders suck. They seem to entertain magical thinking that AI will somehow replace labour. And they seem to deploy it with that end in mind. That's a stupid thing to do, but they have the money so they make the rules. But this idea that they have "software brain" is just laughable. > You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. I beg to differ. "Stelter: Trump encourages people not to believe their eyes, ears or lungs." https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-reliable-sources https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-...
dkrich 5mo ago
This article is the first that I’ve seen that hits on a theme I’ve been pondering for a long time. And that is that everyone super bullish on AI assumes that there are enormous real world gains to be had by existing companies automating software tasks- building software, using software- essentially moving bits around. I’ve been very skeptical of this. We’ve had the ability to automate work between systems with bots and even regular jobs that automate certain repetitive tasks with APIs for years. Yet there’s been a relatively small uptake of bots and there is still a very large market for vendors an SIs who can improve existing processes. I think it’s pretty clear why this disconnect exists between “regular people” and the people Patel describes as having software brain. And that is that the nature of LLMs is that they are limited to the digital world. At the core they really only do one thing and that is take some text, overlay it with digital representations of the world and try and find the one that most closely matches. The inborn assumption is that they will get better and better and climb the corporate ladder, starting in the call center but climbing the corporate ladder to replace everyone’s jobs like Michael J Fox in the Secret of my Succcess. But I’m skeptical. Automation always starts in call central customer service use cases because that is one of the few use cases where humans are involved, they are supposed to follow a script, and take actions entirely inside software applications. But it always seems to stall out. Because once you move from jobs where a script can be provided to ones where ambiguity is a constant factor and judgments and decisions have to made that don’t have exact precedents you need humans. LLMs are backwards looking. Humans can consider things that have happened previously as guidance but critically, can also imagine a future state where things operate differently all why considering multiple competing factors, all of which are unique to that situation. They don’t always do it well but LLMs are incapable of doing it in any case. People hate AI because it doesn’t really do that much for a regular person, is massively hyped by people who look shadier and less credible by the day and has some vague threat of destroying civilization or at least making you homeless. But- I have zero doubt that if these same companies did actually excel at providing real world value, nobody would care about the negative implications. For example if they produced robots that could automate aspects of your life like cleaning your house, getting your groceries and doing it very inexpensively, I have no doubt the popularity would be off the charts and a bona fide bubble would ensue. This is plainly true. First off, Waymo is one of the few companies successfully using AI to operate real world objects at enormous complexity and risk. Talk to anyone who just used Waymo for the first time and they will be almost euphoric. It’s amazing technology with overwhelming utility. There are also several examples of companies with less than stellar images who consumers were told they should boycott but most users couldn’t have cared less. Uber in its earlier days and Facebook coming out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal come to mind.
metalman 5mo ago
intermitent wipers IS automation , and it fails every single time it is used. Causing distraction and exasperation. This is no cutsey joke, it is a simple strait forward absolute test and proof, the day there are 100% perfect and reliable intermitent wipers that never make things worse, then we can talk about automation. Next up, folding chairs and tables, go ahead, you and ALL the ai, design something that is easy, self evident, and will eliminate the significant number of people sitting, now, in a hospital waiting area to get a finger looked at. PROVE IT , NOW! Simple eh?, nope !, applied geometry and routine tasks,many thousands of things that are never quite right and need to monitored adjusted, calibrated, repaired, replaced, and reinvented,figured out, explained, trained and everything else!, go ahead, you and AI fix one thing in such a way as to cause total wide spread adoption of your refinement and the worlds little sigh of relief from knowing that something works right, everytime is yours.
ferwe 5mo ago
https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/5007100cca4f5e8caccceb7366f87484 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/5007100cca4f5e8caccceb736...
neowalter 5mo ago
[dead]
ewean 5mo ago
https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/ee2bc0395d57712e5b917d0951065ae0 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/ee2bc0395d57712e5b917d095...

121 points by icco 5mo ago

ewean 5mo ago

https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/546f1c3ef20d8a8ed69c9f479378d834 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/546f1c3ef20d8a8ed69c9f479... https://gist.github.com/wowopalmoil/eb2b6512b7b046a9dec1611d3066fa3e https://gist.github.com/wowopalmoil/eb2b6512b7b046a9dec1611d...

ferwe 5mo ago

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E-Reverance 5mo ago

Maybe a nitpicky HN comment, but why are we lumping the term automation with very recent grievances about certain kinds of automation

kristianc 5mo ago
The article literally draws that distinction in the first paragraph.
- E-Reverance 5mo ago
  It does? " Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time. "
pixl97 5mo ago
I mean, even going back, people had all kinds of problems with all kinds of automations, e.g. Luddites and the subsequent starving in the streets. I mean, I would think the opposite it the truth. Other than a few masochist CEOs, most people don't like having to work for a living to ensure they don't starve and are homeless. It's just in the current paradigm it's what we have do to. And because we have to do it, people get really nervous when rich people attempt to replace human work with automation. Not because we won't have to work, but because we will have to starve.
- E-Reverance 5mo ago
  People not wanting their jobs be automated is different from not yearning for automation as a principle. Most people want or (at least don't mind) elevators, tap water, dishwashers, traffic lights, electrical fuses, sliding doors, etc. Its a very general term
- 5mo ago

slantaclaus 5mo ago

The dream of automation will never die

Insanity 5mo ago
And our automations dream of electric sheep :). I think there's a more general negative sentiment against AI (a specific type of automation) in recent months. I mean, people are trying to burn down Altman's house. The average person who follows tech news might be more reluctant about automation than before. But there'll always be technologists who push for automation at any cost.

preommr 5mo ago

Obviously not. People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility. Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.

E-Reverance 5mo ago
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if journalist are getting high on their own supply of resentment and fear mongering
rogue7 5mo ago
Agreed for cheaper prices and more flexibility. At least this is what we think we want. But do we actually want it ? A computer 40 years ago was way more expensive than now. How did people do it ? They managed. How do we do it now ? We manage, similarly. Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe. I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ? - More efficient for some things, less efficient for others. - Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related. - More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though). Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem. If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.

fmajid 5mo ago

People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.

ironmagma 5mo ago
Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
  The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing. Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
watwut 5mo ago
Majority of AI use people encounter has zero to do with "automating drudgery" and a lot to do with "producing slop fast and cheap".
- harvey9 5mo ago
  I don't think those are always different things. Imagine writing copy for a store catalogue. It pays the bills but probably isn't anyone's dream job.
  - 5mo ago

RigelKentaurus 5mo ago

A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")

Lutzb 5mo ago
Working in IT and AI related fields I made the opposite observation. Taking as HR an example, professionals there wanted to keep the boring reporting tasks and automate the human part, e.g. career guidance, mediation etc.. At the time I could not understand the reason why. In hindsight it was a reward driven decision. Human to human interaction is rarely instantly rewarded. Producing reports on the other hand is measurable and mostly rewarded right away.
- greedo 5mo ago
  This is compounded by many managers not understanding the details of what their direct reports actually do. I've had so many supervisors in my career who just have no concept of what I really do in IT, though it's pretty obvious to me and my coworkers. So when it comes to review time, I'm always having to walk them through what I actually do. Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
gyanchawdhary 5mo ago
thank you, I was hoping to write this but your comment saved me from typing it :)
wavemode 5mo ago
> A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written. In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load. > The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.") In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.

rogue7 5mo ago

Personally, it depends. If I could automate taking the trash out, I would do probably want to do it (not sure though). But what remains when everything is automated ? Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need. Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.

ArekDymalski 5mo ago
> But what remains when everything is automated? The answer has been perfectly captured in this czechoslovakian cartoon made in 1984. https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared
- SyneRyder 5mo ago
  I shouldn't admit it, but when you described a czechoslovakian cartoon about automation, my first thought went straight to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI&t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI&t=14s
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- euroderf 5mo ago
  There is also the film Zardoz.

mft_ 5mo ago

I want us to automate food production and distribution. I want us to automate creation of building materials and creation of buildings. I want us to automate power generation, and see the marginal cost of power drop to zero. I want us to automate clean transport. I want us to automate cleaning up the planet.

smallmancontrov 5mo ago
I'd like to not die of Baumol's Cost Disease along the way, though.
- Legend2440 5mo ago
  Baumol's cost disease also benefits you, because it makes your wages go up even if you haven't increased productivity.
  - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
    Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
kilroy123 5mo ago
Same here. Then let's automate building vast O'Neill cylinders and habitats we can live in.
- whattheheckheck 5mo ago
  Why
  - Dig1t 5mo ago
    Why not? Humans are awesome and should colonize the universe. There is much science to do and there are many things to build.

uriahlight 5mo ago

Ahh yes. AI is polling worse than ICE. Doesn't mean much since ICE would be polling quite well with much of the country. Typical low-quality journalism.

agentbonnybb 5mo ago

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pizzly 5mo ago

I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing. Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials. Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.

greazy 5mo ago
Automated drug discovery is already a thing. The proceeding steps are the issue, clinical trials, formulation, safety testing, etc, economies of scale etc. True automation of scientific research requires true AI. I'm not really sure why tech people keep suggesting scientists aren't incorporating the latest tech. We are all about automation. The issue is funding.

deterministic 5mo ago

Take away automation from our factories and farmers and see how quickly civilisation will fall apart.

smarm52 5mo ago

> The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. This is sophomoric. This person is the "editor in chief" and I'm guessing that no one had the job security to tell them that this article was silly on the face of it. The title is good rage bait: "People Do Not Yearn for Automation". Obviously false, and it draws in the readers that want to say "Nuh uh!". But the meat of the article is on how the seeming disconnect between technological elites and other people has lead to them touting AI when they should consider other alternatives. This premise is shown to be dubious by a statistics in the article: > In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI ... > That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. So, a simple question, why are so many people using something they claim to hate? Doesn't that spark a bit of interest in the author? No? They would very much like to blame industry leaders, rather than take a more nuanced view. That said industry leaders suck. They seem to entertain magical thinking that AI will somehow replace labour. And they seem to deploy it with that end in mind. That's a stupid thing to do, but they have the money so they make the rules. But this idea that they have "software brain" is just laughable. > You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. I beg to differ. "Stelter: Trump encourages people not to believe their eyes, ears or lungs." https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-reliable-sources https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-...

dkrich 5mo ago

This article is the first that I’ve seen that hits on a theme I’ve been pondering for a long time. And that is that everyone super bullish on AI assumes that there are enormous real world gains to be had by existing companies automating software tasks- building software, using software- essentially moving bits around. I’ve been very skeptical of this. We’ve had the ability to automate work between systems with bots and even regular jobs that automate certain repetitive tasks with APIs for years. Yet there’s been a relatively small uptake of bots and there is still a very large market for vendors an SIs who can improve existing processes. I think it’s pretty clear why this disconnect exists between “regular people” and the people Patel describes as having software brain. And that is that the nature of LLMs is that they are limited to the digital world. At the core they really only do one thing and that is take some text, overlay it with digital representations of the world and try and find the one that most closely matches. The inborn assumption is that they will get better and better and climb the corporate ladder, starting in the call center but climbing the corporate ladder to replace everyone’s jobs like Michael J Fox in the Secret of my Succcess. But I’m skeptical. Automation always starts in call central customer service use cases because that is one of the few use cases where humans are involved, they are supposed to follow a script, and take actions entirely inside software applications. But it always seems to stall out. Because once you move from jobs where a script can be provided to ones where ambiguity is a constant factor and judgments and decisions have to made that don’t have exact precedents you need humans. LLMs are backwards looking. Humans can consider things that have happened previously as guidance but critically, can also imagine a future state where things operate differently all why considering multiple competing factors, all of which are unique to that situation. They don’t always do it well but LLMs are incapable of doing it in any case. People hate AI because it doesn’t really do that much for a regular person, is massively hyped by people who look shadier and less credible by the day and has some vague threat of destroying civilization or at least making you homeless. But- I have zero doubt that if these same companies did actually excel at providing real world value, nobody would care about the negative implications. For example if they produced robots that could automate aspects of your life like cleaning your house, getting your groceries and doing it very inexpensively, I have no doubt the popularity would be off the charts and a bona fide bubble would ensue. This is plainly true. First off, Waymo is one of the few companies successfully using AI to operate real world objects at enormous complexity and risk. Talk to anyone who just used Waymo for the first time and they will be almost euphoric. It’s amazing technology with overwhelming utility. There are also several examples of companies with less than stellar images who consumers were told they should boycott but most users couldn’t have cared less. Uber in its earlier days and Facebook coming out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal come to mind.

metalman 5mo ago

intermitent wipers IS automation , and it fails every single time it is used. Causing distraction and exasperation. This is no cutsey joke, it is a simple strait forward absolute test and proof, the day there are 100% perfect and reliable intermitent wipers that never make things worse, then we can talk about automation. Next up, folding chairs and tables, go ahead, you and ALL the ai, design something that is easy, self evident, and will eliminate the significant number of people sitting, now, in a hospital waiting area to get a finger looked at. PROVE IT , NOW! Simple eh?, nope !, applied geometry and routine tasks,many thousands of things that are never quite right and need to monitored adjusted, calibrated, repaired, replaced, and reinvented,figured out, explained, trained and everything else!, go ahead, you and AI fix one thing in such a way as to cause total wide spread adoption of your refinement and the worlds little sigh of relief from knowing that something works right, everytime is yours.

ferwe 5mo ago

https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/5007100cca4f5e8caccceb7366f87484 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/5007100cca4f5e8caccceb736...

neowalter 5mo ago

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ewean 5mo ago

https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/ee2bc0395d57712e5b917d0951065ae0 https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/ee2bc0395d57712e5b917d095...