9 ms·

The Next Button

90 points by frisco 4y ago

b112 4y ago
Coming next, mass layoffs!
- mcs_ 4y ago
  That could be the output of big company's Next Button, after downloading Q2 report...
ktpsns 4y ago
In the age of Desktop Siri, this feature could also be very risky to ship if it fails for the masses the same way as clippy, the MS word assistant, failed 20 years ago.
- Perceval 4y ago
  Apple bought Cue in order to bring the "surfacing what's temporally relevant to the user" experience to Siri. I don't really see much of what Cue worked on manifesting in Siri since the acquisition, except for the Siri watchface for Apple Watch. https://www.cultofmac.com/248525/why-apple-bought-cue-hint-to-build-you-a-better-iwatch/ https://www.cultofmac.com/248525/why-apple-bought-cue-hint-t...
ohadron 4y ago
This could be really helpful for procrastination. Since sometimes the hardest part is just to start, this could generate helpful nudges towards productive outcome.
riebschlager 4y ago
Hasn't the promise of technology always been the automation of labor to free us up to enjoy lives of leisure? Instead it seems we are hyper-concentrated on speeding up the treadmill of productivity. The invention that comes right after the "next" button is a tool to analyze your nexts-per-hour trends.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  We have easier and safer jobs than anyone in history, and the highest quality of material life. If you wanted to live the quality of life of a regularl worker in 1900 you can probably do it driving Uber 2 hours a day. We work more hours because we want the improving lifestyle
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Where can you rent on ~$50 a day, and still have money left over for food and car payments (necessary for that job), let alone things that a regular worker could afford in 1900?
    - phonescreen_man 4y ago
      Pretty much most of northern England, outside London a lot of people get by on 18k a year salaries
    - IanCal 4y ago
      You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900. Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.html#CHAPTER_IV https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht... Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        I also recommend Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier for a report on workers in northern England in the 1930s and their living conditions (and the second part on why Socialism isn't being embraced in the UK, but that's a different topic). I'm pretty sure that's also easy to achieve today.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
bayindirh 4y ago
Considering whole image detection subject stemmed from a homework which can be done in a summer break at most, the optimism of the post makes me chuckle. I guess this will require at least one big breakthrough to realize, but this is again an overly optimistic take on the issue.
AndrewDucker 4y ago
A (very) short story on this subject: http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.li...
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  After analyzing your personal information, I propose this Next action: > Launch the Next app uninstaller. [Reject] [Accept]
- SamBam 4y ago
  > "It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us." A very good line.
iambateman 4y ago
I think this was an interesting thought experiment but I actually think it is subtly off-base. The Next Button would be just a little bit off too often to be useful. But I definitely think a bot will be able to take direct input along the lines of “open gmail and draft all responses” and then execute that. It’s like self-driving. The bot either needs to be capable of doing everything or it will still need significant direction along the way. This is not to quibble with the author - I think the future will be weird, but I don’t think we will be able to release a bot to choose its own adventure for quite some time.
chairmanwow1 4y ago
There is a group working on this: https://www.adept.ai/act https://www.adept.ai/act
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kimburgess 4y ago
AI Clippy - the true paperclip maximiser.
amelius 4y ago
I'd like something that is trained on StackOverflow and can help with network problems, installation errors, and such. (and before an AI can do this flawlessly, programmers should not be worried too much about their jobs)
trabant00 4y ago
I have a question: if current AI can or will shortly be able to replace or significantly augment knowledge workers, why would any company that posses such tech make it available for the public or other companies? Keeping it private, secret even, would allow taking over entire domains like IT, media, law consulting, etc and that would generate unimaginable wealth.
- amelius 4y ago
  They are not giving it away, they are only giving access. Huge difference. Let the public figure out a good business model using your APIs, then shut them off once they have found it.
- VLM 4y ago
  Could be too capital intensive to run. Could be asking the wrong question. In AI we gave up in the 80s on top down lets write an expert system and now we're trying bottom up. What if we're asking the wrong question? People of a scientific analytical bent like to think they think in a scientific analytical bent, but most of the time they actually rehash old fads or do primate dominance rituals. As such making an AI that solves problems might not be what anyone wants. Take for example, ohms law, a very useful mathmatical construct; why hasn't it utterly revolutionized womens fashion? Turns out women's fashion has very little overlap with ohms law. Perhaps the "craft" of knowledge work is less analytical than people want to think and as such a perfect analytical tool might be of minimal use. Surely you can't argue that a pocket calculator app on a phone is not analytical, but it hasn't revolutionized much of anything either despite its remarkable analytical power; the world was built with slide rules, then CAD/CAM FEM simulation with minimal time in between and as such the calculator doesn't matter much.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Also known as DWIM in the 90's (80's? 70's?): http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html "it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have."
JoelMcCracken 4y ago
Every once in a while I think about this. I want a desktop environment that lets me organize things into "activities"/tasks; sets of tabs, different editors, different apps, which are essentially isolated from each other, shut down when I want and restore state when I want. Roughly, I would prefer if my interaction with the computer was almost "reverse-repl"; the computer is consistently prompting me, and providing me suggested tools for how to proceed. I would love this. It would make a lot of things more straightforward imo (especially for someone with ADHD, like me).
jerf 4y ago
This is a very interesting idea, I'm sure it isn't going to happen, and while I won't quite promise I won't use it, I'm going to be very reluctant and slow to do so, for several reasons: 1. Imagine having a device that simply did whatever you needed, only, physically. Would you use? It would be hard not to. But the resulting atrophy would be very dangerous to you. There is a certain amount of effort you need to exert on your own, or you will lose the ability to exert any effort. But your effort is what you're getting paid for.... 2. Extensive use of this tool would impact its own effectiveness, by depriving it of training data. It would eventually stereotype you into a rut, whether you liked it or not. This would be the equivalent of an over-stereotyped recommendation list for YouTube or TikTok, only converted into my work life. Not necessarily a good idea. 3. This would give more power than I particularly care for over to the person designing this tool. Defaults have a lot of power as it is; witness the power of the default search engine in a browser. Putting my entire computer life at the disposal of someone else's choice of defaults like that is even worse, especially with the amount of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise, that would be deployed in the choices. Yes, yes, in a perfect world it would just neutrally do what you want and the person developing it would simply ethically resist all offers to skew the answers for profit. In reality, well, basically, lol, no, that's not what will happen. All that said, like I said, it is going to happen. Though it will take more than 12-18 months. It is not completely clear how to map a "language model" to this task, and I think it will take longer. (I mean "not completely clear" straight. I don't mean that as a rhetorically-lightened "I don't think it's possible"; I think it is. However, I suspect the stupid obvious ideas will need significant refinement before they work, and the development cycle is going to need some time to go around the loop a few times.) Also, this would be a lot easier if we lived in a world where something like Appletalk was still alive and everything was able to be interacted with in such a standard way. While the ML task for a tool like this is nontrivial, most likely the bulk of the work by person-hour is going to be hooking it to all the bespoke APIs and GUI automation and all the other crap work of trying to get this to work with actual tools correctly. (I mean, it's darned near "reimplementing Appletalk, except from the outside and without help from the OS vendor this time".)
- deet 4y ago
  Would you want it if it offered you control and transparency? Like, how would you feel about someone taking care of the heavy lifting of API integration and GUI automation and then letting you as an individual choose how to extend or automate your workflow? Like through a developer API? Perhaps connectable to AI models with transparent inputs and outputs and that you can override or customize yourself?
carapace 4y ago
First, if you think this is a good idea, please go watch James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k It's brief, entertaining, and grounding. - - - - The ultimate question is What is good?. That question is an open-ended intelligence test. See "Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical knowing agent" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf "Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Intuitive%20Ordinal%20Notations%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (In case it's not clear the connection is that figuring out the "best" course of action requires a similar kind of infinite or at least unbounded intelligence as the ION task.)
falcolas 4y ago
This makes the assumption that this Next Button can correctly identify most important (let alone remotely appropriate) thing for me to do next. Given how aggressively and confidently wrong ML tools often are, why would anybody trust this kind of tool at all? Seems like it would have the ability to make any job into a "BS job" tool. Especially if any metrics are associated with it. "Why haven't we released any new features, even though we're constantly closing tickets?" "The Next Button is giving all the tickets to the PMs, and it's having our engineers do code reviews on closed PRs. The EMs and above are inundated with so many auto-generated email loops that they can't do anything else.
ForestCritter 4y ago
My next button...is the one I need to repair my flannel shirt. I made sure all three of my milenial children had sewing boxes and could hand sew simple repairs. Can they choose to pay someone else, get a new shirt or ask Mom to do it because I am much faster, sure. But the point is they have that choice and more importantly no one is making assumptions for and about them and consequently taking their choices away in the process.Allowing tech to think and prioritize for me with a generic next button seems to me a recipe to become an automaton following the proscribed next thing. Maybe I'm just wary of being spoon fed, I like making my own choices like deciding to not be productive sometimes. For example, will this next button ever steer you to Hacker News so you can chase down some rabbit holes and attempt some existential commentary on buttons or will it be another way to keep you r nose to the proscribed grindstone with a sprinkling of sanctioned leisure?
rmac 4y ago
i need this, as a procrastinator who struggles to start. i looked at academic research into this space but came back pretty disillusioned. Seems like the space is still very early -> Fast Inference and Transfer of Compositional Task Structures for Few-shot Task Generalization: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf Learning to Navigate the Web: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility: https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136680304.pdf https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136... MiniWoB++: a web interaction benchmark for reinforcement learning: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus
euroderf 4y ago
I for one like this idea. One problem with GTD is all the friction involved. The apps tend to absorb too much time/attention/effort with their fiddly UI bits, and then one must spend time & effort retrieving & restoring prior context (mental & otherwise) in order to get into the swing of something. If the Next Button did what this article describes, whilst also presenting a shortlist of other things it could fire up and drop me into right away - frictionlessly - a sort of "batteries included" desktop - I'd be into it.

The Next Button

90 points by frisco 4y ago

b112 4y ago

Coming next, mass layoffs!

mcs_ 4y ago
That could be the output of big company's Next Button, after downloading Q2 report...

ktpsns 4y ago

In the age of Desktop Siri, this feature could also be very risky to ship if it fails for the masses the same way as clippy, the MS word assistant, failed 20 years ago.

Perceval 4y ago
Apple bought Cue in order to bring the "surfacing what's temporally relevant to the user" experience to Siri. I don't really see much of what Cue worked on manifesting in Siri since the acquisition, except for the Siri watchface for Apple Watch. https://www.cultofmac.com/248525/why-apple-bought-cue-hint-to-build-you-a-better-iwatch/ https://www.cultofmac.com/248525/why-apple-bought-cue-hint-t...

ohadron 4y ago

This could be really helpful for procrastination. Since sometimes the hardest part is just to start, this could generate helpful nudges towards productive outcome.

riebschlager 4y ago

Hasn't the promise of technology always been the automation of labor to free us up to enjoy lives of leisure? Instead it seems we are hyper-concentrated on speeding up the treadmill of productivity. The invention that comes right after the "next" button is a tool to analyze your nexts-per-hour trends.

xyzelement 4y ago
We have easier and safer jobs than anyone in history, and the highest quality of material life. If you wanted to live the quality of life of a regularl worker in 1900 you can probably do it driving Uber 2 hours a day. We work more hours because we want the improving lifestyle
- SamBam 4y ago
  Where can you rent on ~$50 a day, and still have money left over for food and car payments (necessary for that job), let alone things that a regular worker could afford in 1900?
  - phonescreen_man 4y ago
    Pretty much most of northern England, outside London a lot of people get by on 18k a year salaries
  - IanCal 4y ago
    You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900. Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.html#CHAPTER_IV https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht... Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I also recommend Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier for a report on workers in northern England in the 1930s and their living conditions (and the second part on why Socialism isn't being embraced in the UK, but that's a different topic). I'm pretty sure that's also easy to achieve today.
  - xyzelement 4y ago

bayindirh 4y ago

Considering whole image detection subject stemmed from a homework which can be done in a summer break at most, the optimism of the post makes me chuckle. I guess this will require at least one big breakthrough to realize, but this is again an overly optimistic take on the issue.

AndrewDucker 4y ago

A (very) short story on this subject: http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.li...

FeepingCreature 4y ago
After analyzing your personal information, I propose this Next action: > Launch the Next app uninstaller. [Reject] [Accept]
SamBam 4y ago
> "It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us." A very good line.

iambateman 4y ago

I think this was an interesting thought experiment but I actually think it is subtly off-base. The Next Button would be just a little bit off too often to be useful. But I definitely think a bot will be able to take direct input along the lines of “open gmail and draft all responses” and then execute that. It’s like self-driving. The bot either needs to be capable of doing everything or it will still need significant direction along the way. This is not to quibble with the author - I think the future will be weird, but I don’t think we will be able to release a bot to choose its own adventure for quite some time.

chairmanwow1 4y ago

There is a group working on this: https://www.adept.ai/act https://www.adept.ai/act

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kimburgess 4y ago

AI Clippy - the true paperclip maximiser.

amelius 4y ago

I'd like something that is trained on StackOverflow and can help with network problems, installation errors, and such. (and before an AI can do this flawlessly, programmers should not be worried too much about their jobs)

trabant00 4y ago

I have a question: if current AI can or will shortly be able to replace or significantly augment knowledge workers, why would any company that posses such tech make it available for the public or other companies? Keeping it private, secret even, would allow taking over entire domains like IT, media, law consulting, etc and that would generate unimaginable wealth.

amelius 4y ago
They are not giving it away, they are only giving access. Huge difference. Let the public figure out a good business model using your APIs, then shut them off once they have found it.
VLM 4y ago
Could be too capital intensive to run. Could be asking the wrong question. In AI we gave up in the 80s on top down lets write an expert system and now we're trying bottom up. What if we're asking the wrong question? People of a scientific analytical bent like to think they think in a scientific analytical bent, but most of the time they actually rehash old fads or do primate dominance rituals. As such making an AI that solves problems might not be what anyone wants. Take for example, ohms law, a very useful mathmatical construct; why hasn't it utterly revolutionized womens fashion? Turns out women's fashion has very little overlap with ohms law. Perhaps the "craft" of knowledge work is less analytical than people want to think and as such a perfect analytical tool might be of minimal use. Surely you can't argue that a pocket calculator app on a phone is not analytical, but it hasn't revolutionized much of anything either despite its remarkable analytical power; the world was built with slide rules, then CAD/CAM FEM simulation with minimal time in between and as such the calculator doesn't matter much.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Also known as DWIM in the 90's (80's? 70's?): http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html "it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have."

JoelMcCracken 4y ago

Every once in a while I think about this. I want a desktop environment that lets me organize things into "activities"/tasks; sets of tabs, different editors, different apps, which are essentially isolated from each other, shut down when I want and restore state when I want. Roughly, I would prefer if my interaction with the computer was almost "reverse-repl"; the computer is consistently prompting me, and providing me suggested tools for how to proceed. I would love this. It would make a lot of things more straightforward imo (especially for someone with ADHD, like me).

jerf 4y ago

This is a very interesting idea, I'm sure it isn't going to happen, and while I won't quite promise I won't use it, I'm going to be very reluctant and slow to do so, for several reasons: 1. Imagine having a device that simply did whatever you needed, only, physically. Would you use? It would be hard not to. But the resulting atrophy would be very dangerous to you. There is a certain amount of effort you need to exert on your own, or you will lose the ability to exert any effort. But your effort is what you're getting paid for.... 2. Extensive use of this tool would impact its own effectiveness, by depriving it of training data. It would eventually stereotype you into a rut, whether you liked it or not. This would be the equivalent of an over-stereotyped recommendation list for YouTube or TikTok, only converted into my work life. Not necessarily a good idea. 3. This would give more power than I particularly care for over to the person designing this tool. Defaults have a lot of power as it is; witness the power of the default search engine in a browser. Putting my entire computer life at the disposal of someone else's choice of defaults like that is even worse, especially with the amount of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise, that would be deployed in the choices. Yes, yes, in a perfect world it would just neutrally do what you want and the person developing it would simply ethically resist all offers to skew the answers for profit. In reality, well, basically, lol, no, that's not what will happen. All that said, like I said, it is going to happen. Though it will take more than 12-18 months. It is not completely clear how to map a "language model" to this task, and I think it will take longer. (I mean "not completely clear" straight. I don't mean that as a rhetorically-lightened "I don't think it's possible"; I think it is. However, I suspect the stupid obvious ideas will need significant refinement before they work, and the development cycle is going to need some time to go around the loop a few times.) Also, this would be a lot easier if we lived in a world where something like Appletalk was still alive and everything was able to be interacted with in such a standard way. While the ML task for a tool like this is nontrivial, most likely the bulk of the work by person-hour is going to be hooking it to all the bespoke APIs and GUI automation and all the other crap work of trying to get this to work with actual tools correctly. (I mean, it's darned near "reimplementing Appletalk, except from the outside and without help from the OS vendor this time".)

deet 4y ago
Would you want it if it offered you control and transparency? Like, how would you feel about someone taking care of the heavy lifting of API integration and GUI automation and then letting you as an individual choose how to extend or automate your workflow? Like through a developer API? Perhaps connectable to AI models with transparent inputs and outputs and that you can override or customize yourself?

carapace 4y ago

First, if you think this is a good idea, please go watch James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k It's brief, entertaining, and grounding. - - - - The ultimate question is What is good?. That question is an open-ended intelligence test. See "Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical knowing agent" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf "Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Intuitive%20Ordinal%20Notations%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (In case it's not clear the connection is that figuring out the "best" course of action requires a similar kind of infinite or at least unbounded intelligence as the ION task.)

falcolas 4y ago

This makes the assumption that this Next Button can correctly identify most important (let alone remotely appropriate) thing for me to do next. Given how aggressively and confidently wrong ML tools often are, why would anybody trust this kind of tool at all? Seems like it would have the ability to make any job into a "BS job" tool. Especially if any metrics are associated with it. "Why haven't we released any new features, even though we're constantly closing tickets?" "The Next Button is giving all the tickets to the PMs, and it's having our engineers do code reviews on closed PRs. The EMs and above are inundated with so many auto-generated email loops that they can't do anything else.

ForestCritter 4y ago

My next button...is the one I need to repair my flannel shirt. I made sure all three of my milenial children had sewing boxes and could hand sew simple repairs. Can they choose to pay someone else, get a new shirt or ask Mom to do it because I am much faster, sure. But the point is they have that choice and more importantly no one is making assumptions for and about them and consequently taking their choices away in the process.Allowing tech to think and prioritize for me with a generic next button seems to me a recipe to become an automaton following the proscribed next thing. Maybe I'm just wary of being spoon fed, I like making my own choices like deciding to not be productive sometimes. For example, will this next button ever steer you to Hacker News so you can chase down some rabbit holes and attempt some existential commentary on buttons or will it be another way to keep you r nose to the proscribed grindstone with a sprinkling of sanctioned leisure?

rmac 4y ago

i need this, as a procrastinator who struggles to start. i looked at academic research into this space but came back pretty disillusioned. Seems like the space is still very early -> Fast Inference and Transfer of Compositional Task Structures for Few-shot Task Generalization: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf Learning to Navigate the Web: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility: https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136680304.pdf https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136... MiniWoB++: a web interaction benchmark for reinforcement learning: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus

euroderf 4y ago

I for one like this idea. One problem with GTD is all the friction involved. The apps tend to absorb too much time/attention/effort with their fiddly UI bits, and then one must spend time & effort retrieving & restoring prior context (mental & otherwise) in order to get into the swing of something. If the Next Button did what this article describes, whilst also presenting a shortlist of other things it could fire up and drop me into right away - frictionlessly - a sort of "batteries included" desktop - I'd be into it.