5 ms·

> There is no field of "probabilistic UX" for example. How do you provide a consistent user experience when the underlying engine of your application is inconsi

> There is no field of "probabilistic UX" for example. How do you provide a consistent user experience when the underlying engine of your application is inconsistent? Sure there is. Every single in person store you go into and how staff are trained to interact with customers. It’s hard, and yet there are clear experts in it.

emseetech 3y ago
Is that a 1:1 comparison? There's a considerable difference between human-human interaction and human-computer interaction.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  Also consider human-horse interaction. The horse was quite useful for most of human history, despite not being perfectly reliable.
  - emseetech 3y ago
    Please explain yourself, otherwise this comes off as an unhelpful non-sequitur.
    - anomaly_ 3y ago
      Mate, why would you need this explained in detail to you? You claimed that there is no field of probabilistic UX and that it would be difficult to "provide a consistent user experience when the underlying engine of your application is inconsistent" -- the other posters just gave you two highly analogous examples where humans have been dealing with inconsistent UX for thousands of years.
      - emseetech 3y ago
        I guess I do need it explained. What is the horse in this situation? > humans have been dealing with inconsistent UX for thousands of years. Like I said: between humans. Or animals. But do you believe the average consumer is going to put in the equivalent amount of effort it takes to break and ride a horse?
        sdenton4 3y ago
        The horse is a horse. They were a major part of human transportation and trade networks for a very long time. The point is that humans have millennia of experience working with and relying on animal intelligence. Animals actually provide an interesting model for contextualizing artificial intelligence; the parallels are inescapable once you start looking at it.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        So are you saying that it's a good thing to have machines that are supposed to be tools tailor made for our needs that need as much consideration and prodding as an animal needs? Because that feels like hell. Software is already often frustrating enough with smug UX "designers" imposing their changes for the sake of change on users.
        famouswaffles 3y ago
        Whether anyone thinks it's a "good thing" or not is kind of irrelevant. You're free to try and build regular deterministic software that can do the things GPT-4 or Midjourney can. Hint: Some of the greatest minds tried this way for decades and failed. It's so bad that we abandoned GOFAI for NNs in NLP long before the emergence of the likes of GPT. We use Connectist Neural Networks today because they work not because it was our first choice. The plain truth of the matter is that all the General Real-World Intelligences we know, whether human, animal or now even silicon work this way, with a "probabilistic UI". In fact, the idea that it can work any other way has succeeded only in the realm of fiction and it wasn't for a lack of trying.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        That isn't sufficient justification to force these tools into things that require some strict determinism. We've already seen cases of companies being forced to compensate users because their fancy AI toy was unpredictable and gave a user incorrect information: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-cha... That was only customer service with little harm done, hammering these kinds of tools into medicine, defense or law is going to risk even worse consequences, and I fully expect people drawing false equivalences between animal intelligence and current generation AI will just attempt to dodge responsibility for their reprehensible decisions when they inevitably cause losses of life. Lowering the stakes a bunch and coming back down to say, apps, if I have to talk to my phone to get it to do stuff that I used to just be able to do without having to hold a conversation with it, it'd be a clear downgrade. The reason Google Assistant and Siri on phones remained mostly just gimmicks is that it's just faster to search for something or enter an appointment manually than to ask for it to schedule it when you have a physical interface in your hand already. Forcing things like that might work out in the short term for our tech oligopolies, but it's only going to further increase the push for breaking them up. As an example, I presented on the current state of LLMs to a group of non-techies at my workplace about how we could leverage LLMs to enhance our productivity, and the discussion with others who had tried them also concluded that they were simply too unpredictable to trust for anything where a human isn't immediately checking the output. I fully expect that all these irresponsible false equivalencies will lead to software, and especially AI usage, being heavily regulated in the same way that construction or flight is.
    - patcon 3y ago
      He's saying all minds are probabilistic ux. We handle them fine, and built whole worlds on them. The predictability and determinism of digital system is the detour that is perhaps the flash in the pan. My sense is that the information ecology is about to get MUCH more ecological and fuzzy... (I appreciated the exchange in this thread fwiw.)

emseetech 3y ago

Is that a 1:1 comparison? There's a considerable difference between human-human interaction and human-computer interaction.

sdenton4 3y ago
Also consider human-horse interaction. The horse was quite useful for most of human history, despite not being perfectly reliable.
- emseetech 3y ago
  Please explain yourself, otherwise this comes off as an unhelpful non-sequitur.
  - anomaly_ 3y ago
    Mate, why would you need this explained in detail to you? You claimed that there is no field of probabilistic UX and that it would be difficult to "provide a consistent user experience when the underlying engine of your application is inconsistent" -- the other posters just gave you two highly analogous examples where humans have been dealing with inconsistent UX for thousands of years.
    - emseetech 3y ago
      I guess I do need it explained. What is the horse in this situation? > humans have been dealing with inconsistent UX for thousands of years. Like I said: between humans. Or animals. But do you believe the average consumer is going to put in the equivalent amount of effort it takes to break and ride a horse?
      - sdenton4 3y ago
        The horse is a horse. They were a major part of human transportation and trade networks for a very long time. The point is that humans have millennia of experience working with and relying on animal intelligence. Animals actually provide an interesting model for contextualizing artificial intelligence; the parallels are inescapable once you start looking at it.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        So are you saying that it's a good thing to have machines that are supposed to be tools tailor made for our needs that need as much consideration and prodding as an animal needs? Because that feels like hell. Software is already often frustrating enough with smug UX "designers" imposing their changes for the sake of change on users.
        famouswaffles 3y ago
        Whether anyone thinks it's a "good thing" or not is kind of irrelevant. You're free to try and build regular deterministic software that can do the things GPT-4 or Midjourney can. Hint: Some of the greatest minds tried this way for decades and failed. It's so bad that we abandoned GOFAI for NNs in NLP long before the emergence of the likes of GPT. We use Connectist Neural Networks today because they work not because it was our first choice. The plain truth of the matter is that all the General Real-World Intelligences we know, whether human, animal or now even silicon work this way, with a "probabilistic UI". In fact, the idea that it can work any other way has succeeded only in the realm of fiction and it wasn't for a lack of trying.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        That isn't sufficient justification to force these tools into things that require some strict determinism. We've already seen cases of companies being forced to compensate users because their fancy AI toy was unpredictable and gave a user incorrect information: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-cha... That was only customer service with little harm done, hammering these kinds of tools into medicine, defense or law is going to risk even worse consequences, and I fully expect people drawing false equivalences between animal intelligence and current generation AI will just attempt to dodge responsibility for their reprehensible decisions when they inevitably cause losses of life. Lowering the stakes a bunch and coming back down to say, apps, if I have to talk to my phone to get it to do stuff that I used to just be able to do without having to hold a conversation with it, it'd be a clear downgrade. The reason Google Assistant and Siri on phones remained mostly just gimmicks is that it's just faster to search for something or enter an appointment manually than to ask for it to schedule it when you have a physical interface in your hand already. Forcing things like that might work out in the short term for our tech oligopolies, but it's only going to further increase the push for breaking them up. As an example, I presented on the current state of LLMs to a group of non-techies at my workplace about how we could leverage LLMs to enhance our productivity, and the discussion with others who had tried them also concluded that they were simply too unpredictable to trust for anything where a human isn't immediately checking the output. I fully expect that all these irresponsible false equivalencies will lead to software, and especially AI usage, being heavily regulated in the same way that construction or flight is.
  - patcon 3y ago
    He's saying all minds are probabilistic ux. We handle them fine, and built whole worlds on them. The predictability and determinism of digital system is the detour that is perhaps the flash in the pan. My sense is that the information ecology is about to get MUCH more ecological and fuzzy... (I appreciated the exchange in this thread fwiw.)