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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 co

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.
        emseetech 3y ago
        > too unpredictable to trust for anything where a human isn't immediately checking the output. Not just any human either, but one with enough specific domain knowledge to understand subtle failures. It’s why I strongly recommend against junior developers or anyone new to a language or framework to not use Copilot. I call this the Babysitter Problem. There’s probably a more official academic term, but in general I don’t any of these vc funded ai startups are asking the right questions when it comes to UX.
  - emseetech 3y ago
    The equivalency breaks down quickly, and even when it's appropriate, it doesn't paint a rosy picture of what interacting with ai will be. If using an app goes from the modern equivalent of mindless clicking (which has taken billions of dollars to get there, but we've all seen babies use iPads) to the equivalent of personally training and directing an animal, we're going to experience a massive degredation of quality in user experience because of it. And re-training these models is magnitudes harder than redesigning a predictable UX around user data. Not to mention people are not promising these models as horses pulling a carriage or walking with a man on top but as doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and engineers and drone operators.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      Sadly, deterministic ux code is unable to do everything. So typically we hire people to do the things computers can't do on their own. Those people have a user interface (speech and text), and a tendency to not perfectly execute your instructions, because the prescribed task is often under specified. Likewise, humans have used animals to extend their capabilities for millennia, and, like other people, animals have their own sets of capabilities, needs, and shortcomings. What they have in common, and I think ai will be like this as well, is that to get stuff done well you need to understand the capabilities and strengths of the mind you are working with. Working with minds requires some level of relationship with those minds. If you have use cases where a CRUD approach is plenty, then you don't need a mind in the implementation, and that's totally fine! Let a mess of JavaScript do what a mess of JavaScript is good at. (though you'll certainly need a mind to implement it). But we already work with minds that are experts - and smarter and more experienced than we are - in medicine, law, and so on. We are used to knowing that good results in these areas are built on building a bridge with another mind. I'm curious why you would expect that we would ever want to replace, say, a psychiatrist with a button press? The expressivity possible with deterministic software is simply insufficient to the complexity of the problem space.

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.
      - emseetech 3y ago
        > too unpredictable to trust for anything where a human isn't immediately checking the output. Not just any human either, but one with enough specific domain knowledge to understand subtle failures. It’s why I strongly recommend against junior developers or anyone new to a language or framework to not use Copilot. I call this the Babysitter Problem. There’s probably a more official academic term, but in general I don’t any of these vc funded ai startups are asking the right questions when it comes to UX.
- emseetech 3y ago
  The equivalency breaks down quickly, and even when it's appropriate, it doesn't paint a rosy picture of what interacting with ai will be. If using an app goes from the modern equivalent of mindless clicking (which has taken billions of dollars to get there, but we've all seen babies use iPads) to the equivalent of personally training and directing an animal, we're going to experience a massive degredation of quality in user experience because of it. And re-training these models is magnitudes harder than redesigning a predictable UX around user data. Not to mention people are not promising these models as horses pulling a carriage or walking with a man on top but as doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and engineers and drone operators.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    Sadly, deterministic ux code is unable to do everything. So typically we hire people to do the things computers can't do on their own. Those people have a user interface (speech and text), and a tendency to not perfectly execute your instructions, because the prescribed task is often under specified. Likewise, humans have used animals to extend their capabilities for millennia, and, like other people, animals have their own sets of capabilities, needs, and shortcomings. What they have in common, and I think ai will be like this as well, is that to get stuff done well you need to understand the capabilities and strengths of the mind you are working with. Working with minds requires some level of relationship with those minds. If you have use cases where a CRUD approach is plenty, then you don't need a mind in the implementation, and that's totally fine! Let a mess of JavaScript do what a mess of JavaScript is good at. (though you'll certainly need a mind to implement it). But we already work with minds that are experts - and smarter and more experienced than we are - in medicine, law, and so on. We are used to knowing that good results in these areas are built on building a bridge with another mind. I'm curious why you would expect that we would ever want to replace, say, a psychiatrist with a button press? The expressivity possible with deterministic software is simply insufficient to the complexity of the problem space.