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I've been reading a lot of Asimov lately. It's really fun whenever one of his predictions about the future are wrong. For example, in his short story "Franchi

I've been reading a lot of Asimov lately. It's really fun whenever one of his predictions about the future are wrong. For example, in his short story "Franchise" (written in 1955), he predicts that by the year 2008, that US elections will be decided by a supercomputer named Multivac, which itself is a bit funny. But the part that is really funny is the way Multivac provides its output to the humans: Somehow he had thought Multivac would speak in a sepulchral, superhuman voice, resonant and echoing, but that, after all, was just an idea he had from seeing too many television shows, he now decided. The truth was distressingly undramatic. The questions were slips of a kind of metallic foil patterned with numerous punctures. A second machine converted the pattern into words and Paulson read the words to Norman, then gave him the question and let him read it for himself. Norman's answers were taken down by a recording machine, played back to Norman for confirmation, with emendations and added remarks also taken down. All that was fed into a pattern-making instrument and that, in turn, was radiated to Multivac. The text is a bit confusing out of context. Mutlivac is asking questions to a human (Norman). A machine spits out the questions onto some foil tape, which another human (Paulson) then feeds into another machine, which converts the tape to text (presumably on a sheet paper). The whole UX seems laughingly complicated given the fact that they have a supercomputer which is capable of running their whole society.

sroussey 4y ago
So he thought about air-gapping the AIs from each other…
- waltbosz 4y ago
  Miltivac was the only AI, the other machines were just IO devices.
redsparrow 4y ago
Maybe Asimov didn't think that the described scenario would be the state of the art for UX at the time, but that there would be other reasons for that UX. Maybe without some sophisticated ritual and human involvement the process wouldn't be accepted by the people? Many of our institutional, and democratic, processes involve extra steps and rituals, sometimes anachronistic, and maybe this is meant to be a reflection of that? Perhaps the creators and operators of the machine also want it to have to complicated UX out of self interest. This could be a way of staying involved and/or retaining some control over the machine and its use. I'm just speculating without any knowledge of the story in general...
- HTTP418 4y ago
  Look at Japan, they still use Fax for everything. Sometimes once a UX or system is accepted it hard to replace it with another system, even if the newer system appears to be better.
citizenpaul 4y ago
Of course that was silly that an AI would decide the best election outcome. It implied that humans would actually desire an election outcome based on effectiveness. The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes. Its funny that HN is supposed to be filled with logical people yet all the time yet jump over logic to get to their creation. I see creators lament,I built this perfect thing and no one wanted it. Exactly. People don't want effective things, they want better things for themselves which usually comes at the cost of others.
- waltbosz 4y ago
  > The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes. And this really frustrates me. I try to vote based on who I think could best do the job, but there is no real data source for me to make my decision. Plus my vote is so terribly diluted by the feelings voters. ... In the fictional society, people voluntarily (presumable because of an existing social contract) feed data about themselves into Multivac. Multivac then considers all this data and uses it to pick the elections winners (it picks all election races, not just presidential). There is only one actual human who votes (Norman), and he doesn't really cast a ballot. Rather, he is interviewed by Multivac to help it make the final decision. Every election year, Multivac uses its vast data on all humans to pick the voter of the year, and this year it's Norman. Norman is just a store clerk, not some important dignitary.
  - visarga 4y ago
    SciFi about AIs deciding elections? Here's a real paper on using GPT-3 to simulate a human poll. > Specifically, they do three social science experiments on GPT-3 and discover that GPT-3 has biases that are “fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups.” You could run an election "in silico" based on knowing the demographic profiles of your population. https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-simulate-real-people-ai-discovers-better-matrix-multiplication-microsoft-worries-about-next-gen-deepfakes/ https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...

sroussey 4y ago

So he thought about air-gapping the AIs from each other…

waltbosz 4y ago
Miltivac was the only AI, the other machines were just IO devices.

redsparrow 4y ago

Maybe Asimov didn't think that the described scenario would be the state of the art for UX at the time, but that there would be other reasons for that UX. Maybe without some sophisticated ritual and human involvement the process wouldn't be accepted by the people? Many of our institutional, and democratic, processes involve extra steps and rituals, sometimes anachronistic, and maybe this is meant to be a reflection of that? Perhaps the creators and operators of the machine also want it to have to complicated UX out of self interest. This could be a way of staying involved and/or retaining some control over the machine and its use. I'm just speculating without any knowledge of the story in general...

HTTP418 4y ago
Look at Japan, they still use Fax for everything. Sometimes once a UX or system is accepted it hard to replace it with another system, even if the newer system appears to be better.

citizenpaul 4y ago

Of course that was silly that an AI would decide the best election outcome. It implied that humans would actually desire an election outcome based on effectiveness. The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes. Its funny that HN is supposed to be filled with logical people yet all the time yet jump over logic to get to their creation. I see creators lament,I built this perfect thing and no one wanted it. Exactly. People don't want effective things, they want better things for themselves which usually comes at the cost of others.

waltbosz 4y ago
> The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes. And this really frustrates me. I try to vote based on who I think could best do the job, but there is no real data source for me to make my decision. Plus my vote is so terribly diluted by the feelings voters. ... In the fictional society, people voluntarily (presumable because of an existing social contract) feed data about themselves into Multivac. Multivac then considers all this data and uses it to pick the elections winners (it picks all election races, not just presidential). There is only one actual human who votes (Norman), and he doesn't really cast a ballot. Rather, he is interviewed by Multivac to help it make the final decision. Every election year, Multivac uses its vast data on all humans to pick the voter of the year, and this year it's Norman. Norman is just a store clerk, not some important dignitary.
- visarga 4y ago
  SciFi about AIs deciding elections? Here's a real paper on using GPT-3 to simulate a human poll. > Specifically, they do three social science experiments on GPT-3 and discover that GPT-3 has biases that are “fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups.” You could run an election "in silico" based on knowing the demographic profiles of your population. https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-simulate-real-people-ai-discovers-better-matrix-multiplication-microsoft-worries-about-next-gen-deepfakes/ https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...