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It's so funny when people try to build robots imitating people. I mean part funny, part tragedy of the upcoming bust. The irony being, we would have been better

It's so funny when people try to build robots imitating people. I mean part funny, part tragedy of the upcoming bust. The irony being, we would have been better off with an interoperable flight booking API standard which a deterministic headless agent could use to make perfect bookings every single time. There is a reason current user interfaces stem from a scientific discipline once called "Human-Computer Interaction".

doug_durham 2y ago
Your use of the word "perfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Perfect" is a word embedded in a high dimensional space whose local maxima are different for every human on the planet.
- hansmayer 2y ago
  No, it's just the intuitively perfect that comes to mind in this context, i.e. reliable and guaranteed to produce a safe outcome. Much like Amazon checkout process. I am fine giving my credit card details to near-perfect automatons like that. I will never give it to a statistical model, which may or may not hallucinate the sum it is supposed to enter into an interface built for humans, not computers.
jatins 2y ago
But that's the promise of AI, right? You can't put an API on everything for human + technological reasons.
- hansmayer 2y ago
  It is a promise alright :)
- dartos 2y ago
  You can’t put an API on everything because it’d take a ton of time and money to pull that off. I can’t think of any technological reasons why every digital system can’t have an API (barring security concerns, as those would need to be case by case) So instead, we put 100s of billions of dollars into statistical models hoping they could do it for us. It’s kind of backwards.
  - Scene_Cast2 2y ago
    You change who's paying.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Sure, as a biz it makes sense, but as a society, it’s obviously a big failure.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    A web page is an Application/Human Interface. Outside of security concerns, companies can make more money if they control the Application/Human Interface, and reduce the risk of a middleman / broker extorting them for margins. If I run a flight aggregator that has a majority of flight bookings, I can start charging 'rents' by allowing featured/sponsored listings to be promoted above the 'best' result, leading to a prisoner's dilemma where airlines should pay up to their margins to keep market share. If an AI company becomes the default application human interface, they can do the same thing. Pay OpenAI tribute or be ended as a going concern.
    - dartos 2y ago
      LLMs as a natural language interface is fine. What I’m saying is that if there was a standard protocol for making travel plans over the internet, we wouldn’t need an AI agent to book a trip. We could just create great user experiences that expose those APIs like we do for pretty much everything on the web.
  - daxfohl 2y ago
    Exactly. It should take around 10 parameters to book a flight. Not 30,000,000,000 and a dedicated nuclear power plant.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
It's a business problem, not a tech problem. We don't have a solution you described because half of the air travel industry relies on things not being interoperable. AI is the solution at the limit, one set of companies selling users the ability to show a middle finger to a much wider set of companies - interoperability by literally having a digital human approximation pretending to be the user.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The airlines rely on things not interoperating for you. However their agents interoperate all the time via code sharing. They don't want normal people to do this but if something goes wrong with the airplane you should be on they would prefer you to get there than not.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > They don't want normal people to do this That's the root of the problem. That's precisely why computers are not the "bicycles for the minds" they were imagined to be. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. Most of the tech industry makes money inserting themselves between you and your problem and trying to make sure you're stuck with them.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  I've been a sentient human for at least the last 15 years of tech advancement. Assuming this stuff actually works, it's only a matter of time before these AI services claw back all that value for themselves and hold users and businesses hostage to one another, just like social media and e-commerce before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification Unless these tools can be run locally independent of a service provider, we're just trading one boss for another.
  - aledalgrande 2y ago
    > Unless these tools can be run locally independent of a service provider, we're just trading one boss for another. Not only that, we have to be careful about all the integrations being built around it. Thankfully the MCP standard is becoming mainstream (used by Anthropic, OpenAI and next could be Google) and it's an open standard, even if started by Anthropic so we won't have e.g. Anthropic specific integrations.

doug_durham 2y ago

Your use of the word "perfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Perfect" is a word embedded in a high dimensional space whose local maxima are different for every human on the planet.

hansmayer 2y ago
No, it's just the intuitively perfect that comes to mind in this context, i.e. reliable and guaranteed to produce a safe outcome. Much like Amazon checkout process. I am fine giving my credit card details to near-perfect automatons like that. I will never give it to a statistical model, which may or may not hallucinate the sum it is supposed to enter into an interface built for humans, not computers.

jatins 2y ago

But that's the promise of AI, right? You can't put an API on everything for human + technological reasons.

hansmayer 2y ago
It is a promise alright :)
dartos 2y ago
You can’t put an API on everything because it’d take a ton of time and money to pull that off. I can’t think of any technological reasons why every digital system can’t have an API (barring security concerns, as those would need to be case by case) So instead, we put 100s of billions of dollars into statistical models hoping they could do it for us. It’s kind of backwards.
- Scene_Cast2 2y ago
  You change who's paying.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Sure, as a biz it makes sense, but as a society, it’s obviously a big failure.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  A web page is an Application/Human Interface. Outside of security concerns, companies can make more money if they control the Application/Human Interface, and reduce the risk of a middleman / broker extorting them for margins. If I run a flight aggregator that has a majority of flight bookings, I can start charging 'rents' by allowing featured/sponsored listings to be promoted above the 'best' result, leading to a prisoner's dilemma where airlines should pay up to their margins to keep market share. If an AI company becomes the default application human interface, they can do the same thing. Pay OpenAI tribute or be ended as a going concern.
  - dartos 2y ago
    LLMs as a natural language interface is fine. What I’m saying is that if there was a standard protocol for making travel plans over the internet, we wouldn’t need an AI agent to book a trip. We could just create great user experiences that expose those APIs like we do for pretty much everything on the web.
- daxfohl 2y ago
  Exactly. It should take around 10 parameters to book a flight. Not 30,000,000,000 and a dedicated nuclear power plant.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

It's a business problem, not a tech problem. We don't have a solution you described because half of the air travel industry relies on things not being interoperable. AI is the solution at the limit, one set of companies selling users the ability to show a middle finger to a much wider set of companies - interoperability by literally having a digital human approximation pretending to be the user.

bluGill 2y ago
The airlines rely on things not interoperating for you. However their agents interoperate all the time via code sharing. They don't want normal people to do this but if something goes wrong with the airplane you should be on they would prefer you to get there than not.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > They don't want normal people to do this That's the root of the problem. That's precisely why computers are not the "bicycles for the minds" they were imagined to be. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. Most of the tech industry makes money inserting themselves between you and your problem and trying to make sure you're stuck with them.
the_snooze 2y ago
I've been a sentient human for at least the last 15 years of tech advancement. Assuming this stuff actually works, it's only a matter of time before these AI services claw back all that value for themselves and hold users and businesses hostage to one another, just like social media and e-commerce before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification Unless these tools can be run locally independent of a service provider, we're just trading one boss for another.
- aledalgrande 2y ago
  > Unless these tools can be run locally independent of a service provider, we're just trading one boss for another. Not only that, we have to be careful about all the integrations being built around it. Thankfully the MCP standard is becoming mainstream (used by Anthropic, OpenAI and next could be Google) and it's an open standard, even if started by Anthropic so we won't have e.g. Anthropic specific integrations.