4 ms·

This has been my big question with all of these Generative AI stuff that will - write emails - go to meetings - any other type of activity that involves shar

This has been my big question with all of these Generative AI stuff that will - write emails - go to meetings - any other type of activity that involves sharing information. Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god (barring the meetings produced by the priests of agile to appease the Agile God). We communicate in order to share information from one person to another for a reason. So if we have a workflow where someone uses AI to generate an email, that results in a meeting that is then summarized by AI, that is then sent to an inbox that is then scanned and the contents of which is summarized by AI. What was the point of any of it? At no point did a human learn any new information. It was all just various LLMs generating symbols that changed nothing in the real world. What is the end goal of this? Or is the hope that if we get enough AI hooked up to each other it will magically just start creating and selling products and money will magically appear and everyone will be happy? At the end of the day the internet revolution was all about Information Technology. That information exists to be consumed, understood and acted upon by human beings, to change our understanding of the world. If we are just having AI talk to AI to talk to AI, it was all an exercise in pointlessness.

empath-nirvana 3y ago
Almost every meeting you attend, almost every email you read, is pointless or irrelevant to you. If an AI can do it for you, you probably should have never been involved to begin with. If all this AI accomplishes nothing but filtering out several hours a week of pointless bullshit, then "mission accomplished", IMO.
chpatrick 3y ago
> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god (barring the meetings produced by the priests of agile to appease the Agile God). We communicate in order to share information from one person to another for a reason. So if we have a workflow where someone uses AI to generate an email, that results in a meeting that is then summarized by AI, that is then sent to an inbox that is then scanned and the contents of which is summarized by AI. What was the point of any of it? Because we didn't have a machine that can do this whole collective decision-making process. What if we make an AI that's powerful enough to replace a whole organization? A whole company? A whole industry?
- gustavus 3y ago
  Ya but I'm not talking about Skynet at this point, maybe when the AI gets more capable we'll get there, but I don't imagine that ChatGPT is going to be replacing most of the engineers on my team right now.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    It's not even Skynet. Imagine if in a few years we can make a big LLM that reads and sends emails instead of an organization and can make decisions. I don't think that's that far off.
    - aedocw 3y ago
      For a really fun exploration of this, read Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.
      - disqard 3y ago
        Thanks for the rec!
- username332211 3y ago
  One imagines an AI replacing an engineering company would not hold meetings, it'd produce plans, schematics and software. I won't expect the robot manager to have a robot secretary, who complains to the RR department when manager makes inappropriate remarks.
enragedcacti 3y ago
> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god We do however have lots and lots of ritual as to how those communications occur in order to confer the proper respect and tone. In most cases its pretty much noise but you can't skip it because skipping it means offense was intended. We can all recognize this but we aren't really free to escape it. Generating emails with AI lets a person avoid the appearance of intentional offense and summarizing emails with AI lets you cut to the point while acknowledging that you are dispensing with all of the ritual. Who knows, maybe after long enough the cultural convention can shift to just sending your prompt straight to the other person! Obviously I'm skipping over a ton of pitfalls but I think that captures the appeal for a lot of people.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  If you want to learn how to be a digital hermit then that is probably not a bad idea. Directly interacting with humans means dealing with their humanity - and that needs practice.
  - enragedcacti 3y ago
    Totally agreed, as I said, pitfalls. I don't think constantly generating slop with the real message embedded inside to send back and forth is the best way to do things, but it's the local maximum I think we are headed towards because of the incentives and social dynamics involved.
sircastor 3y ago
There's an entire superstructure of people that exist in jobs that might not be necessary or valuable (the jobs, not the people.) The reports, the meetings, the evaluations, etc, are all constructed to fulfill the wants and needs of those jobs, and the jobs above them and so on. Does it meaningfully inform the work that is being done, or the product that's being made? I think what this tends to reveal is just how much of a house of cards the modern business world is.
- koprulusector 3y ago
  Obligatory plug for the book “Bullshit Jobs.” But, what you’ve said is the mail on the head. What blows my mind is how much engineering effort we collectively put into consumerism and business process, without taking a step back to the design phase and asking ourselves if we need a new architecture.
- throwaway29812 3y ago
  It's more simple than that. Most jobs don't need to exist, but most people need jobs for a society to function. There is a basic conflict then between business (who optimize for cost) and government (who optimize for stability).
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    So why then would private business not eliminate those unnecessary jobs in order to control cost? If they are set in their ways, then why don't they get outcompeted by more efficient companies that skip those vestigial roles?
    - throwaway29812 3y ago
      They are (or will soon), and that will create massive problems for stability of society at large (which is why government will have to intervene).
    - sircastor 3y ago
      The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs. It's a classic instance of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And it's systemic. The product of management is reports. The product of management is meetings. To them (and the people who ultimately run the company) these are the solutions. Have a meeting, write a report, do a review. Those are the tools they know. They have hammers. Everything is nails.
fassssst 3y ago
There is too much information flowing between humans right now. AI can help filter it.
famouswaffles 3y ago
AI taking to AI to do things is not necessarily an exercise in futility. This paper used 3.5, not even 4 and is basically a couple AI agents collaborating to create software. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924 This is another example at multi AI agent collaboration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485 Getting relevant intelligent text to arbitrary previous text means generating text capable of making decisions. That is the end game here. Your machine can think for you now.
- stephendause 3y ago
  That's a good point. Still, I think that's different from an AI agent attending a meeting "for you" as a surrogate. If I were in a meeting where someone sent their personal AI assistant instead of attending, I would be insulted. I'd much rather someone send me a note explaining why they can't be there and letting me know anything they want from those of us in the meeting.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    Well if I have it correctly right now for duet, the personal AI assistant act is only on the receiving end of the person missing the meeting. You can talk to the AI about the meeting but the AI won't talk to the attendees (only share generated notes)
- sdeframond 3y ago
  This reminds me of the book priced at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) by algorithms. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/ https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/
itiro 3y ago
We developed that stuff because we were paid to. We were paid to make and use those technologies because we were taught that’s how society works. Fiat economics is not solving human problems. It’s propagating fiat economics. Humans have no divine purpose. The universe does not force social norms on us. We do that to each other. You exist to pass the butt… dollars around. Fiat economics has filled the biological hole religion stumbled upon, probably helped evolve. The only reason for any of this is deference to those who came before.
tempodox 3y ago
I can't help but perceive the smell of a solution in search of a problem with all those ‘things that “AI” can do for you’.
m_0x 3y ago
> everyone will be happy? Shareholders will be happy the day a company produces a new product and no human ever worked on its development. All of the profits, none of those pesky workers demanding silly things such as payments and OSHA protections.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god Yeah, you say this like it's obvious, but it's quite an honest and productive line of inquiry. But whatever the history of meetings are, it's undeniable that a lot of the current ones are merely ritualistic. And yes, the one single way to deal with the ritualistic meetings is to not attend them. I am nearly convinced that this headline is an attempt of modern art, instead of objective information. Even though the application looks like something with real goals.
atleta 3y ago
I had similar thoughts when I read a comment from a (non-technical) project manager in a discussion a few months ago. He said something like he uses ChatGPT to summarize the long winded emails of their developer. (He was working for/owning some kind of agency where apparently software developers weren't in the focus, really.) He also mentioned writing emails with ChatGPT (though I can't remember if these were for communicating with the devs, but it doesn't really matter). I remember thinking that well, you my friend are pretty ignorant and not someone I'd like to work with. Even unethical. So someone puts in the work to inform you about important details of their work/thought process and then this guy just ignores the whole thing. Even if the developer in question is really sharing more details than needed the right thing to do is to actually manage them and teach them to share less and make their own decision. (Hard to tell from the outside, of course, and the manager in question might be wrong too.) Now if someone also blows up their own emails with generated details, especially if it's toward the same person whose email they have compressed with the AI then besides robbing the time of others, they may successfully deceive others and themselves and pretend that they have the knowledge what they don't have. And that will hurt the decisions made by them and by others. Basically the shared reality that you want to create with communication will not be a shared reality but out-of-sync views and you'll end up with a lot more "oh, but when I said that I thought you meant X...."
- disqard 3y ago
  You raise a good point, and it reminds me of a sort of "Prisoners Dilemma" (sender uses/avoids LLM-verbosification and/or recipient filters all emails through LLM-summarization). The worst-case scenario is that human communication becomes completely routed through this LLM-in-the-middle.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

Almost every meeting you attend, almost every email you read, is pointless or irrelevant to you. If an AI can do it for you, you probably should have never been involved to begin with. If all this AI accomplishes nothing but filtering out several hours a week of pointless bullshit, then "mission accomplished", IMO.

chpatrick 3y ago

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god (barring the meetings produced by the priests of agile to appease the Agile God). We communicate in order to share information from one person to another for a reason. So if we have a workflow where someone uses AI to generate an email, that results in a meeting that is then summarized by AI, that is then sent to an inbox that is then scanned and the contents of which is summarized by AI. What was the point of any of it? Because we didn't have a machine that can do this whole collective decision-making process. What if we make an AI that's powerful enough to replace a whole organization? A whole company? A whole industry?

gustavus 3y ago
Ya but I'm not talking about Skynet at this point, maybe when the AI gets more capable we'll get there, but I don't imagine that ChatGPT is going to be replacing most of the engineers on my team right now.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  It's not even Skynet. Imagine if in a few years we can make a big LLM that reads and sends emails instead of an organization and can make decisions. I don't think that's that far off.
  - aedocw 3y ago
    For a really fun exploration of this, read Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.
    - disqard 3y ago
      Thanks for the rec!
username332211 3y ago
One imagines an AI replacing an engineering company would not hold meetings, it'd produce plans, schematics and software. I won't expect the robot manager to have a robot secretary, who complains to the RR department when manager makes inappropriate remarks.

enragedcacti 3y ago

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god We do however have lots and lots of ritual as to how those communications occur in order to confer the proper respect and tone. In most cases its pretty much noise but you can't skip it because skipping it means offense was intended. We can all recognize this but we aren't really free to escape it. Generating emails with AI lets a person avoid the appearance of intentional offense and summarizing emails with AI lets you cut to the point while acknowledging that you are dispensing with all of the ritual. Who knows, maybe after long enough the cultural convention can shift to just sending your prompt straight to the other person! Obviously I'm skipping over a ton of pitfalls but I think that captures the appeal for a lot of people.

RandomLensman 3y ago
If you want to learn how to be a digital hermit then that is probably not a bad idea. Directly interacting with humans means dealing with their humanity - and that needs practice.
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  Totally agreed, as I said, pitfalls. I don't think constantly generating slop with the real message embedded inside to send back and forth is the best way to do things, but it's the local maximum I think we are headed towards because of the incentives and social dynamics involved.

sircastor 3y ago

There's an entire superstructure of people that exist in jobs that might not be necessary or valuable (the jobs, not the people.) The reports, the meetings, the evaluations, etc, are all constructed to fulfill the wants and needs of those jobs, and the jobs above them and so on. Does it meaningfully inform the work that is being done, or the product that's being made? I think what this tends to reveal is just how much of a house of cards the modern business world is.

koprulusector 3y ago
Obligatory plug for the book “Bullshit Jobs.” But, what you’ve said is the mail on the head. What blows my mind is how much engineering effort we collectively put into consumerism and business process, without taking a step back to the design phase and asking ourselves if we need a new architecture.
throwaway29812 3y ago
It's more simple than that. Most jobs don't need to exist, but most people need jobs for a society to function. There is a basic conflict then between business (who optimize for cost) and government (who optimize for stability).
- sangnoir 3y ago
  So why then would private business not eliminate those unnecessary jobs in order to control cost? If they are set in their ways, then why don't they get outcompeted by more efficient companies that skip those vestigial roles?
  - throwaway29812 3y ago
    They are (or will soon), and that will create massive problems for stability of society at large (which is why government will have to intervene).
  - sircastor 3y ago
    The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs. It's a classic instance of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And it's systemic. The product of management is reports. The product of management is meetings. To them (and the people who ultimately run the company) these are the solutions. Have a meeting, write a report, do a review. Those are the tools they know. They have hammers. Everything is nails.

fassssst 3y ago

There is too much information flowing between humans right now. AI can help filter it.

famouswaffles 3y ago

AI taking to AI to do things is not necessarily an exercise in futility. This paper used 3.5, not even 4 and is basically a couple AI agents collaborating to create software. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924 This is another example at multi AI agent collaboration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485 Getting relevant intelligent text to arbitrary previous text means generating text capable of making decisions. That is the end game here. Your machine can think for you now.

stephendause 3y ago
That's a good point. Still, I think that's different from an AI agent attending a meeting "for you" as a surrogate. If I were in a meeting where someone sent their personal AI assistant instead of attending, I would be insulted. I'd much rather someone send me a note explaining why they can't be there and letting me know anything they want from those of us in the meeting.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Well if I have it correctly right now for duet, the personal AI assistant act is only on the receiving end of the person missing the meeting. You can talk to the AI about the meeting but the AI won't talk to the attendees (only share generated notes)
sdeframond 3y ago
This reminds me of the book priced at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) by algorithms. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/ https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

itiro 3y ago

We developed that stuff because we were paid to. We were paid to make and use those technologies because we were taught that’s how society works. Fiat economics is not solving human problems. It’s propagating fiat economics. Humans have no divine purpose. The universe does not force social norms on us. We do that to each other. You exist to pass the butt… dollars around. Fiat economics has filled the biological hole religion stumbled upon, probably helped evolve. The only reason for any of this is deference to those who came before.

tempodox 3y ago

I can't help but perceive the smell of a solution in search of a problem with all those ‘things that “AI” can do for you’.

m_0x 3y ago

> everyone will be happy? Shareholders will be happy the day a company produces a new product and no human ever worked on its development. All of the profits, none of those pesky workers demanding silly things such as payments and OSHA protections.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> Humanity didn't develop emails, or have meetings, or communications because it some sort of ritual to a strange god Yeah, you say this like it's obvious, but it's quite an honest and productive line of inquiry. But whatever the history of meetings are, it's undeniable that a lot of the current ones are merely ritualistic. And yes, the one single way to deal with the ritualistic meetings is to not attend them. I am nearly convinced that this headline is an attempt of modern art, instead of objective information. Even though the application looks like something with real goals.

atleta 3y ago

I had similar thoughts when I read a comment from a (non-technical) project manager in a discussion a few months ago. He said something like he uses ChatGPT to summarize the long winded emails of their developer. (He was working for/owning some kind of agency where apparently software developers weren't in the focus, really.) He also mentioned writing emails with ChatGPT (though I can't remember if these were for communicating with the devs, but it doesn't really matter). I remember thinking that well, you my friend are pretty ignorant and not someone I'd like to work with. Even unethical. So someone puts in the work to inform you about important details of their work/thought process and then this guy just ignores the whole thing. Even if the developer in question is really sharing more details than needed the right thing to do is to actually manage them and teach them to share less and make their own decision. (Hard to tell from the outside, of course, and the manager in question might be wrong too.) Now if someone also blows up their own emails with generated details, especially if it's toward the same person whose email they have compressed with the AI then besides robbing the time of others, they may successfully deceive others and themselves and pretend that they have the knowledge what they don't have. And that will hurt the decisions made by them and by others. Basically the shared reality that you want to create with communication will not be a shared reality but out-of-sync views and you'll end up with a lot more "oh, but when I said that I thought you meant X...."

disqard 3y ago
You raise a good point, and it reminds me of a sort of "Prisoners Dilemma" (sender uses/avoids LLM-verbosification and/or recipient filters all emails through LLM-summarization). The worst-case scenario is that human communication becomes completely routed through this LLM-in-the-middle.