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AI is about to change how you use computers
- catchnear4321 3y agomonetization is of course not going to show up there. will your agent be programmed to tell you about one fast food vendor over another? will that change over time? will you be told? of course things look rosy up there in that ivory tower. but how is the foundation going to hold up?
- mnd999 3y agolol, no it’s not. Maybe one day, but not with the current tech.
- compacct27 3y agoThe writing is on the wall. It's not right now, but it will be in my lifetime. What are some AI-proof(ish) industries we can jump into after software engineering is drastically reduced?
- niceice 3y agoHVAC
- yoyohello13 3y agoDitch digging should be safe for quite some time.
- jedberg 3y agoMining has been mostly autonomous for years. Digging in the ground at a specific place is a pretty well solved problem.
- ben_w 3y agoI'm frequently surprised by what people think can't be mechanised and by extension automated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavator
- yoyohello13 3y agoI've watched enough episodes of Dirty Jobs to know there are still many people out there digging ditches in weird places.
- packetlost 3y agoThis type of sentiment is not valuable at all and overly pessimistic. Current AI tech is not very likely to replace work that requires a modicum of logical reasoning and the tech to do so has no known path forward as of now.
- compacct27 3y agoReplace? No. Highly reduce? Absolutely.
- packetlost 3y agoAre you currently functionally limited by your typing speed? No? You're probably fine. I'd take a team of juniors that have full autonomy to make informed decisions with some hand holding than a tool that has no logical reasoning and just spits out what the statistically average next thing to do is.
- wild_egg 3y agoHighly reducing just means you can do far more with the same resources. I don't know about you but my team's backlog is virtually endless. If AI/LLM/whatever can automate away a ton of dev work, that doesn't mean we're going to fire 90% of our team. It means we might have a glimpse of being able to actually make a dent in all the work that we want to do but can't.
- ben_w 3y agoWhy do you think those things? Logic & theorem provers massively predate LLMs, and getting LLMs to use them is as easy as asking the LLM to write a proof in the language of your theorem prover of choice, which you can then copy-paste into that theorem prover and execute. And if/when it doesn't work, the error message itself helps with a significant fraction of most other programming problems, so my guess is they would also help here. Also, there have been substantial new developments and discoveries about what transformer models do (both internally and in terms of capacity) every week or two for most of this year, so why do you think there's no known path forward? Thinking of logic, I just tried the following with gpt-3.5, gpt-4, and gpt-4-1106-preview. The newest model spotted the trick (and then still got it wrong), the older two didn't even spot the trick. Can you spot the trick? - A person is in Nairobi. They board a plane, fly 9000 km north, then 1000 km east, then 9000 km south, then 1000 km west. Where are they now?
- ramesh31 3y ago>What are some AI-proof(ish) industries we can jump into after software engineering is drastically reduced? Hospitality will always be a thing. There's a reason why the Enterprise-D still has a human bartender that makes real drinks, even though it's completely superfluous. People will always want to be served by other humans, even if AI Android tech became perfect.
- ben_w 3y agoThe Doylist reason was "we need a role for Whoopi Goldberg". There is no Watsonian reason, as Data did bar duty in the episode they had their memories wiped. Looking back at them, the taking points about AI are basically the same now as in each episode of TNG, DS9, and VOY that is focused on AI, in the form of Data, Moriarty, The Doctor (and if he has copyright over his holonovel), that Irish village in Voyager, Wesley Crusher's nanites or the ship's main computer becoming sentient…
- ramesh31 3y ago>The Doylist reason was "we need a role for Whoopi Goldberg" Fair, but the point still stands. A better example would be Quark's from DS9. Even in a world of perfect replication and perfect androids, people are always going to want a human touch for these things.
- yyyk 3y agoThere's always a need for grave diggers.
- ToValueFunfetti 3y agoDemand is only going up
- ape4 3y agoI've heard that barista is AI proof. Because customers want a person to say "good morning".
- neogodless 3y agoIn Fifth Element, the bartender is a robot. (Works of fiction may or may not reflect our future!) Whether customers prefer that or not may or may not matter to the business decisions that are made (given that it's not a perfect customer-driven market.) Have you been to McDonald's? They really want you to use a touch screen in-person, or an app even though you're in your car, talking to a person. Perhaps an underground movement can maintain a grass roots database of "real human service" locations, after the revolution.
- guhidalg 3y agoA bar is not McDonald’s. Robot bartenders have existed for some time but people go to bars for the human connection not simply to consume alcohol. Even here, a human bartender could probably benefit from a robot doing the work of cleaning glassware and restocking ingredients for them.
- manicennui 3y agoIs it though? It is not having a significant impact in most fields, despite all the hype. Companies will use it to continue to make customer services worse so they can spend less money on it. People writing marketing copy that no one wants to read anyways will lose their jobs. Semi-competent software engineers will use it instead of searching Stack Overflow five times per day and still write questionable code. To be clear, I'm referring to LLM. Obviously ML is used for a lot of analytics, but I also think that most of the hype around ML has died down as companies realized that not every problem has a ML solution. In a few years the same will happen with LLM.
- mjr00 3y ago> It is not having a significant impact in most fields, despite all the hype. Companies will use it to continue to make customer services worse so they can spend less money on it. There's some delicious irony in this: tech-savvy HN posters are so bullish on AI replacing everyone's jobs, yet there's been so many posts here about how people have lost their Google/Apple/bank/whatever accounts due to AI accidentally flagging, then being unable to recover because they can't get in touch with an actual human, with begging for help on social media as their last resort. It seems like a variant of Gell-Mann amnesia[0]: people believe AI is capable of replacing humans in so many aspects of daily life, except for the aspects of daily life which they personally experience. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
- nameless912 3y agoAI will never write software for the same reason professional chefs will never be replaced by robots. Sure, certain parts of our jobs (the fast food equivalent work) will be assisted, and then replaced, with AI help. Ops is already benefitting from AI assistance with things like log correlation and managing incidents, and all of that is great! But the fact is that AI will still require the input of humans to solve problems, and specifying a problem completely enough that a machine can write the code for it is equivalent in effort to just writing the code yourself. I see the introduction of AI to the SWE workforce as roughly equivalent to the introduction of digital kitchen scales, thermometers, etc. to professional kitchens. It's going to help us up our game, which is awesome! It's going to make a lot of the boring, mechanical stuff simpler so we can focus on the creative aspects of our jobs. But a burger flipping robot isn't replacing a michelin star chef anytime soon, and AI isn't replacing you anytime soon.
- compacct27 3y agoI’m hopeful this is the right answer, but I’m not optimistic it is. AI seems more like the introduction of the assembly line for software workers, minus huge blockers for physical labor. It’s not there now, but at this rate? Not infeasible either
- nameless912 3y agoHow will you tell AI what you want to build? I'll take an example from my current work: I'm currently working on adding producing data to a kafka feed from an API server that will be aggregated downstream into a big huge in-memory datastore for fast access. That's a moderately sized problem, one that a reasonably competent engineer can solve in a week or two, but how much work will you have to do to tell the AI that this is what you want? And if you tell it at a higher level than this, how will it know what tools it has available? How will it deploy stuff? There are some fairly intractable problems in the "AI writes software" space. I don't think they're getting solved any time soon.
- ben_w 3y ago> How will you tell AI what you want to build? If software engineers have been replaced, it won't be any of us telling the AI anything, it would be a manager. Ask a manager about Kafka, I recon more would respond with something about Franz than anything about Apache. > And if you tell it at a higher level than this, how will it know what tools it has available? How will it deploy stuff? Step 1. Ask it to come up with a plan, after giving it read access to your corporate documents. Step 2. Ask it to execute the plan it came up with in step 1, after giving it write access. Of course right now there's a step 3: "Get real engineer to read and then perform business continuity/disaster recovery plan because current AI is about as good at this as someone fresh out of university, what on earth were you thinking, …" etc. I don't know how long we've got in these jobs, but based on the rate of change (and the training cost for the larger models and supply shortage for the chips used to train the better models) I'm thinking at least 2 and no more than 15 years — though I'm hoping more towards the latter.
- famouswaffles 3y agoBlue Collar Physical work will fall last. Basically anything that requires expert physical handling. Doesn't really matter though. By the time a LLM can replace all programmers, all white collar work will be gone. That's a lot of workers. Even if we have something competent enough to replace say half of programmers, still a lot of people.
- ben_w 3y agoStuff where the point is to be a human. This in turn may or may not be sufficient for work once the issues with bioprinting and/or tissue/organ culture get solved and someone prints/grows a brainless body, connects its organic lower nervous system to a silicon chip, and has the higher functions all performed by an AI on that chip. And by "someone" I mainly mean The Thought Emporium given they're already trying to do exactly that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_ZGq8Tah0k&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_ZGq8Tah0k&t=28s
- ramesh31 3y agoEvery Bill Gates article reads as a ChatGPT generated fluff piece. Coincidence...?
- beders 3y agoAlso likes to hallucinate stuff :)
- manicennui 3y agoWe're talking about the guy who missed the boat on the Internet and had to rewrite part of his book and change the direction of the company when it was obvious that MS couldn't just ignore it.
- gumballindie 3y ago> The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems Yeah could you f**ng not? I pay taxes and insurance to get proper medical guidance, not answers from a bot. Public healthcare in the uk is nearly dead anyway and their patch fixes are to use “virtual” nonsense, while private healthcare is riddled by “ai” that does nothing but annoy customers. BabylonHealth, a former uk ai “healthcare” darling, rightfully went under because among many things it was gibberish.
- famouswaffles 3y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10425828/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10425828/ Use of GPT-4 to Analyze Medical Records of Patients With Extensive Investigations and Delayed Diagnosis "Six patients 65 years or older (2 women and 4 men) were included in the analysis. The accuracy of the primary diagnoses made by GPT-4, clinicians, and Isabel DDx Companion was 4 of 6 patients (66.7%), 2 of 6 patients (33.3%), and 0 patients, respectively. If including differential diagnoses, the accuracy was 5 of 6 (83.3%) for GPT-4, 3 of 6 (50.0%) for clinicians, and 2 of 6 (33.3%) for Isabel DDx Companion"
- gumballindie 3y agoAh yes, a study made on six patients. Very science, fits the pattern. But this alone invalidates the paper: “AI relies on clinical imaging.1 In low-income countries, where specialist care may be lacking” Have they been to a british hospital recently? Specialist care scarcity is fast approaching that of low income countries. The only option left is the poor man’s choice - chatbots.
- famouswaffles 3y ago>Ah yes, a study made on six patients. Very science, fits the pattern. Still a highly non trivial result. >But this alone invalidates the paper: “AI relies on clinical imaging.1 In low-income countries, where specialist care may be lacking” How does that invalidate the paper ?
- notpachet 3y ago> And even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. Good, that's how I would like it to be!
- kulahan 3y agoThis is how I would like it to be only because I can't trust it to treat my information well. If it was a trustworthy system, this would be an incredible capability.
- itishappy 3y agoWorth noting that that's probably how most people will look at things, and I'm not sure if most people have the background to be able to understand the privacy issues. I guess I'm suggesting that Mr. Gates is probably right, even if it makes us here on HN uncomfortable.
- kulahan 3y agoYeah, I think you're probably spot-on here.
- manmal 3y agoIdeally, that would be an entirely self hosted system.
- enonimal 3y agoI'm anxiously watching two developing spaces for this reason: 1. Homomorphic Encryption 2. Self-Hosted AI Systems Homomorphic encryption is the idea that you can perform ML operations on encrypted data -- so that the providers of powerful AI need not know precisely what data you have. Self-Hosted AI is just what it sounds like -- what if your Alexa processed on-device, and never left your home? What if your mobile devices could "phone home" to it from wherever you were, using an encrypted tunnel? The second point is possible today, but the issue is keeping your local model to pace with the cloud offerings.
- TekMol 3y agoThis is the Bill Gates who in May 2018 proclaimed that he would short Bitcoin if he could: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/bill-gates-i-would-short-bitcoin-if-i-could.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/bill-gates-i-would-short-bit... Bitcoin has quadrupled since then. One might want to take this into account when evaluating his ability to predict the future.
- IntelMiner 3y agoIf you read beyond the headline (shocking, I know) “As an asset class, you’re not producing anything and so you shouldn’t expect it to go up. It’s kind of a pure ‘greater fool theory’ type of investment,” Gates said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I agree I would short it if there was an easy way to do it,” he said. Anyone who thinks the entire "value" of crypto isn't a giant pyramid scheme (or pump and dump) is deluding themselves
- dboreham 3y ago<gets lollipop back out>
- seydor 3y agoonly if we go back to personal computers. i m not connecting my personal ai pod to the internet. updates will come from diskettes
- virtualbluesky 3y agoIs this motivated reasoning from the perspective of an OS vendor? It seems like intermediating the user's intent using AI has the same hazards as intermediating the internet through a single search provider... i.e. it'll happen, but will tend towards benefiting larger interests, leaving the experience a little less rich than before.
- nerdponx 3y agoOf course it's motivated. Make something seem useful so you can sell it to people and/or give it to them for "free" and monetize their data.
- axpy906 3y agoNot gonna click. Does it say anything about tagging and tracking people with AI?
- gumballindie 3y agoNo, but it would appear that ai, according to his view of the world, will provide us with electrolytes. Which we crave.
- JohnFen 3y agoIf that's the future of using computers, he can keep it. I want none of that, personally. Most of what he lists is stuff that comes with such serious downsides as to be actively objectionable.
- sontendo 3y agoThere's no choice. They collect and serve whether you want it or not. Whether it's regulated or not. Whether it's banned or not. You can use alternatives but you have to maintain them meticulously. If any of their websites or services can get a bit in, you're fucked. Welcome to the world of quantum computers, pseudo-AGI and corporate interests.
- JohnFen 3y agoI disagree. I totally have a choice. I can avoid it all by avoiding using the technology. Maintaining my own alternatives isn't a big deal. I'm largely doing that anyway.
- _fs 3y agoHow do plan to avoid the AI overlord camera system that is already in many grocery stores? Instant facial recognition when you walk into the store. Directly tied to your credit card you used on the way out last time. They mapped out your route you are most likely to take. How long until your phone is buzzing to alert you of a hot deal on aisle 12, when you are in aisle 12, for that sugar free soda you drink? Oh yeah, don't forget they are sharing this information with an ad agency who covered the installation cost of not only your grocery store, but also your bank and gas station. All of those prefernces, tied together in a neat little digital folder, ready to sell to the highest bidding government agency.
- JohnFen 3y agoI was talking about my use of my machines (the topic of TFA), not how others use their computers against me. On your topic, I'm not totally helpless, though. I can't do anything about store surveillance except go to stores that don't do that (while they still exist). That said... I can and so put my phone into airplane mode before I enter stores, and I avoid using credit cards in them, specifically to help protect against those kinds of spying.
- landedgentry 3y agoI desperately need a personal assistant because it has become impossible to get anything done now that companies have automated everything and made mistakes and edge cases impossible to resolve. I hope this new wave of automation won't make things even more difficult to manage.
- ahofmann 3y agoYou can bet that it will be much more difficult. Look at Google, how impossible it is to resolve anything with them and how successful they still are. This will be the new normal for everything. Another take on this topic: It is reality right now, but only for poor people, so we can't see it. This will change, we will all suffer from automation.
- diputsmonro 3y agoThe idea of my agent and Google's customer service agent babbling at each other in endless futility and failing to solve a problem that two humans could solve together in 15 minutes is a dystopian hell. But it will be celebrated as a wonderful productivity boost because no humans will be on a phone call.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y ago> And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. That understanding will belong to some company whose interests and goals are not yours. This will not bother most people. Most people are willing to use GMail, even though it snoops on their private emails and uses that info for advertising purposes.
- knowledge-clay 3y ago> This will not bother most people. Most people are willing to use GMail, even though it snoops on their private emails and uses that info for advertising purposes. While I agree with your larger point and am no fan of Google's privacy practices, they stopped this specific behavior in 2017 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513/google-says-it-will-no-longer-read-users-emails-to-sell-targeted-ads https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
- Animats 3y agoNo, at that time Google issued an announcement that at some future time they would stop doing that. However, Google did not modify their terms of service [1] to prohibit them from doing that. "The activity information that we collect may include: Terms that you search for Videos that you watch Views and interactions with content and ads Voice and audio information Purchase activity People with whom you communicate or share content" Google does write "We don’t show you personalised ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail or Photos." That's a narrow exclusion. That info could still affect your YouTube selections or search results. [1] https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-GB#infocollect https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-GB#infocollect
- polynomial 3y agoJust don't rub it in their face and they will let you have all the data you want.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoAn agent is an amazing idea, and it would add enormous convenience - if implemented well. But we're a long, long, long, long, long way away from agents. What we have now aren't even precursors to agents, more like very distant cousins to an ancestor. In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above. And if we have that, the entire world is going to change regardless - personal assistants will be insignificant in comparison. It's difficult to predict when a breakthrough like that would happen, but I doubt it'll be within the next 200 years. What we have now isn't even a stepping stone in the right direction, it's just smoke and mirrors that looks like it is if you only look at it on a surface level.
- throwitaway222 3y agoWork may change significantly soon. Slack lets your conversation kinda go. What happens when slack starts remembering tasks someone asked you to do... follows up with you to make sure you did it? And the person that originally asked you? Right now you arrive at work and you have a few things to do, but your brain only remembers 1 of them, and barely at that. With AI it will have a few iterations on emails ready for you. This is all possible right now with an LLM of today's caliber. He's not talking about general AI.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoWhat he's talking about is absolutely not possible with an LLM. An LLM is just for language and has no deeper understanding, reasoning, logic, learning and growth, etc. See here: "Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior." None of that is possible with today's LLMs - not in the way he's describing it.
- throwitaway222 3y agoAll of that is possible with LLMs: > They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. An LLM can capture things that are "todos" very easily now. If someone messages you and says "can you collect data on the Brenda client" it can know that this is a request. Further, if you give it access to notion or company wiki, it could be tuned to understand your clients, work and much much more.. The LLM can, in today's work: open an email, or a VSCode instance with some pre-filled connection to your analytics database - maybe even a sample query with the Brenda client pre-filled. Across applications - this is more-or-less something that will be coming soon. Within a few months you will see pretty much every major OS (linux, Mac, Windows) announce OS level APIs to interact with a basic LLM, and paid for LLMs. This will enable applications to start communicating with each other because they will generally understand what you're typing and output function calls.. When applications can ubiquitously call "predict(...)" at the OS level, and probably many other AI APIs that will be introduced, you will see a HUGE change in interactivity. Now that being said, it sounds like you're picturing Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or Will Smith in I-Robot. There's a huge in-between you're extending his conversation to that's totally unnecessary.
- renewiltord 3y agoI think I'm really going to enjoy this future. Modern LLMs are fantastic. I've fixed my Peloton that I was stuck on, diagnosed a small lesion, handled ancient proprietary systems. The future is going to be good.
- gumby 3y agoThis guy is such a linear thinker. Remember "The Road Ahead"? I don't know why anyone bothers with his "predictions"
- mempko 3y agoGoogle Deep Mind just demonstrated that transformers don't generalize well outside their training set. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 The question I have is, what if these agents are really good at doing things they learned about, but not in new things? How will that impact people's actions? Will we end up with a static world of people doing only things the AI can do? A kind of 1999 Matrix stasis world of 'the best we can do now'? What will happen to what Arthur Kessler called 'blue' thoughts in such an AI world? Because IMO, the purpose of computers is to make models and see what happens. Test ideas in a powerful way via computation. If the AI can ONLY select existing models and not make news ones, or even prevent you from making new ones, then I don't see how these AI agents are anything but a step backwards. Alan Kay gave a great talk called The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it taht touches on some of these ideas. https://youtu.be/Odmx-ScL-8o?si=PMhZyxTtNdwBumKj https://youtu.be/Odmx-ScL-8o?si=PMhZyxTtNdwBumKj
- dclowd9901 3y ago> In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. This kind of thinking, to me, smacks of the kind of ignorant projections people used to make in the early 20th century about technology in the 21st century. “Robotics will advance, so everyone will have their own personal robot assistant!” Nope, though we do have robots doing things that are commensurate with their cost and the value they provide. “Advances in aviation mean everyone will have a flying car.” Nope again. Turns out the added utility of being able to fly directly to places vs the cost doesn’t trump a car in most cases, and when those cases don’t apply, airplanes are plenty economical. “You’ll just tell your device what you want to do.” No again. In some cases this is useful (I already tell my device to remind me about something or to schedule some sort of event on my calendar, where the time to input far exceeds speaking it), but in most cases, I can do it faster myself with a good UI, or maybe I don’t want everyone around me hearing me blather into my phone. It’s like, just imagine for a second what it would be like to have to dictate everything you do on your phone. It would be utterly exhausting.
- sontendo 3y agoThe free cognitive evolution of your kids and grandkids is at stake here, but you are probably looking the wrong way. Kansas City Shuffles inside Kansas City Shuffles. We refuse to deal with the truth. We need to trust our kind or we will have to take down our past, the ways we lived and worked. It's a generational conflict inside each and every one of us. You know how to code. Decode.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vanilla_nut 3y agoEnshittification has really ruined the promise of every new technology. Sure, I believe there's _potential_ for something cool in AI. But all of that potential is overridden by the rent-seeking profit interests of companies that want to carve out a monopoly position in a space and extract the maximum value forever. > Imagine that you want to plan a trip. A travel bot will identify hotels that fit your budget. An agent will know what time of year you’ll be traveling and, based on its knowledge about whether you always try a new destination or like to return to the same place repeatedly, it will be able to suggest locations. When asked, it will recommend things to do based on your interests and propensity for adventure, and it will book reservations at the types of restaurants you would enjoy. So sort of like AirBnB, but for the entire process of booking a vacation? Sounds neat at first, though I'm skeptical that an AI will ever match my ability to choose destinations, events, and travel plans that encompass all of my minute preferences (many of which have taken me years to discover about myself). I'm sure that this "agent" won't start recommending shitty and overpriced vacations when it achieves critical market share and the time comes to turn the profit screws! This gets much, much, much, much scarier in the next section: > The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment. Just what I want: our private healthcare industry defining how I should seek medical attention using a faceless algorithm. Nurses and doctors, naturally, have empathy for other human beings and occasionally work in the grey boundaries of the system to help people. But that costs profit. Fortunately, the AI will optimize that empathy away! > AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Do mental health experts truly believe that an AI agent can replace an actual therapist? What a scary, dystopian world, where Bill Gates can afford daily therapy sessions with a human but the lowly Microsoft code monkeys will only be able to speak to a machine... The rest of the post is an absolute horror show of the kind of out-of-touch nonsense I've come to expect from billionaires like Gates: > liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job Paperwork, sure. What are these "other tasks", though? Lesson planning? I'm pretty sure optimizing away a small portion of busywork is not the most pressing issue in the teaching world. And naturally this task's dark side is a massive yearly cost extracted from our school system, and oodles of collected personal data about every child, starting in pre-K. Think of the efficiency when we can start advertising to these kids based on what subjects they know best! > If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The next level of "fellow kids". > If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like. If AI can do all of that, what's the human business owner even doing? > If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. Isn't the whole point of that kind of statement that a human being thought of another human being and reached out? But I guess Gates just sees the opportunity to take a cut of flower orders. At least most of your friends won't be able to afford surgery when their insurance AI agents use watch data to deny them healthcare. > Spotify has an AI-powered DJ that not only plays songs based on your preferences but talks to you and can even call you by name. Wow, AI that _knows my name_? We're really living in the future. > If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision. At what point does a human being manage to outsource hobbies to AI? Because if a friend came to me asking about cameras today, but didn't want to do any of the research or learn anything about the space at all to inform a decision, I would simply respond "don't buy a camera, you won't have any clue how to use it". > To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. Interesting. Didn't Gates open this blog post claiming that we wouldn't use apps at all any more? Why would I use an AI agent to create an app in a post-app world? > Although some agents will be free to use (and supported by ads), I think you’ll pay for most of them, which means companies will have an incentive to make agents work on your behalf and not an advertiser’s. If there's one thing smart TVs, Spotify, iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows have taught me, it's that paying does not matter. If a company can make more money by collecting data and inserting ads, they will. You'd think Gates would know that when Windows literally advertises right on the desktop. > Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now we've come to Gates' main point: he apparently wants to live in communist china, where a single entity owns literally everything. At the rate of monopolisation we've seen in the USA, at least I can believe this prediction.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoDeeper interface to wade through, even more mysterious & distancing, oh great. What is changing about how we use computers that is genuinely getting us more in touch, more aware, more capable as computer users?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"640K ought to be enough for anybody" (1981) <-- Gates claims he never said this: https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/ https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e... "The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC" (1984) "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years" (1994) "Today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway" (1995) "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed" (1995) "One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities" (1998) Under oath: "I don't recall" 6x, "I don't remember" 14x, "I don't know" 22x (1998) "[E-mail] spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time" (2004)
- k310 3y agoWhat about when something new happens that's not in the training set? That's called life.