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OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive
- djwide 8mo ago[flagged]
- djwide 8mo agoCan anyone tell me why the comment gets downvoted. The article is past character count - I have to link.
- jlund-molfese 8mo agoThe reason is that most people interpret the comment as noise. It’s very long, so it takes up a lot of space and makes it harder to find comments by people. On HN it’s best to just link to the article, no need to also copy and paste anything in comments except for very short quotes.
- adanto6840 8mo agoBecause the comment is just a copy/paste of the content at the URL at the top of the comment; which doesn’t add anything to the discussion, because it’s not discussion at all. It’s just a wall of text, it’s not clear to me why you’re posting it as a comment (vs linking to it), and simply regurgitating copy/pasted external information isn’t helpful or interesting. Next time, write a sentence or two of context about what you’re going to link to — who wrote it and when, why it’s interesting, and how/why it’s relevant to the topic at hand. There’s almost never a need to copy/paste wholesale external content into an HN comment. Especially true when said content is literally linkable, and actually linked, from your comment!
- alanbernstein 8mo agoConsidering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case. I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily optimistic about the idea, but it's a nice dream.
- stewh_eng 8mo agoIndirectly, this is kind of what I was trying to get at in this weekend project https://github.com/stewhsource/GovernmentGPT https://github.com/stewhsource/GovernmentGPT using the British commons debate history as a starting point to capture divergent views from political affiliation, region and role. Changes over time would be super interesting - but I never had time to dig into that. Tldr; it worked surprisingly well and I know a few students have picked it up to continue on this theme in their research projects
- bahmboo 8mo agoThat looks very interesting. Could use a demo or examples for us short attention spanned individuals. Would be cool to feed it into TTS or video generation like Sora.
- djwide 8mo agoThanks for the comment. Interesting to think about but I am also skeptical of who will be doing the "collecting" and "synthesizing". Both tasks are potentially loaded with political bias. Perhaps it's better than our current system though.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Sheeny96 8mo agoSounds like Helios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbGrpfaaaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbGrpfaaaM
- Zagitta 8mo agoCentralising it is definitely the wrong way to go about it. It'd be much better to train an agent per citizen, that's in their control, and have it participate in a direct democracy setup.
- ativzzz 8mo ago> special government LLM to implement direct democracy I like your optimism, but I think realistically a special government LLM to implement authoritarianism is much more likely. In the end, someone has to enforce the things an LLM spits out. Who does that? The people in charge. If you read any history, the most likely scenario will be the people in charge guiding the LLM to secure more power & wealth. Now maybe it'll work for a while, depending on how good the safeguards are. Every empire only works for a while. It's a fun experiment
- mellosouls 8mo agoThis is an interesting and thoughtful article I think, but worth evaluating in the context of the service ("cognitive security") its author is trying to sell. That's not to undermine the substance of the discussion on political/constitutional risk under the inference-hoarding of authority, but I think it would be useful to bear in mind the author's commercial framing (or more charitably the motivation for the service if this philosophical consideration preceded it). A couple of arguments against the idea of singular control would be that it requires technical experts to produce and manage it, and would be distributed internationally given any countries advanced enough would have their own versions; but it would of course provide tricky questions for elected representatives in the democratic countries to answer.
- djwide 8mo agoThere's not a direct tie to what I'm trying to sell admittedly. I just thought it was a worthwhile topic of discussion - it doesn't need to be politically divisive and I might as well post it on my company site. I don't think there are easy answers to the questions I am posing and any engineering solution would fall short. Thanks for reading.
- MengerSponge 8mo agoA COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoWhile I have great respect for this piece of IBM literature, I will also mention that most humans are not held accountable for management decisions, so I suppose this idea was for a more just world that does not exist.
- lenerdenator 8mo agoI'd say that the fix then is in creating a more just world where leaders are held accountable than to hand it off to something that, by its very nature, cannot be held accountable.
- skirge 8mo agohuman CAN and computer CAN NEVER
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoAccountability is perhaps irrelevant is my point. You can turn off a computer, you can turn off a human. Is that accountability? Accountability only exists if there are consequences, and those consequences matter. What does it mean for them to "matter"? If accountability is taking ownership for mistakes and correcting for improved future outcomes, certainly, I trust the computer more than the human. We are never running out of humans incurring harm within suboptimal systems that continue to allow it.
- deelayman 8mo agoI wonder if that quote is still applicable to systems that are hardwired to learn from decision outcomes and new information.
- svieira 8mo ago
- blibble 8mo agothink we're already there aren't we? no human came out with those tariffs on penguin island
- zozbot234 8mo agoThe really nice thing about this proposal is that at least now we can all stop anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, and give Oracle the properly robot-identifying CEO it deserves.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoBut then we'd have to call it LawnmowerGPT
- jeffrallen 8mo agoI came here for this, am not disappoint. :) Best meme in hacker space, thanks /u/Cantrill.
- Terr_ 8mo agoFor those who haven't seen the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m27s
- pocketarc 8mo agoI think I've read the reference a hundred times throughout my time on HN, but had _never_ actually seen it, thank you for the link!
- alexpotato 8mo agoYou sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years. Examples: - Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the decisions were correct. - Autopilot: planes can now land themselves to an accuracy that is so precise that the front landing gear wheels "thud" as they go over the runway center markers. and this has been true for at least 10 years. In other words, if the above is possible then we are not far off from some kind of "expert system" that runs a business unit (which may be all robots or a mix of robots and people). A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 EDIT: fixed some typos/left out words
- mjr00 8mo ago> A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 This is a piece of science fiction and has its own (inaccurate, IMO) view on how minimum wage McDonald's employees would react to a robot manager. Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.
- pixl97 8mo ago>Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best. Why, it's as much of a view of our past adherence to technology without thinking as a well as a view of the future. "Computer says no" is a saying for a reason.
- nirav72 8mo ago>"Computer says no" is a saying for a reason. Current LLMs rarely or seldom say no. Unless, they're specifically configured to block out certain types of requests.
- pavel_lishin 8mo agoBut none of those things are AI in the same sense that we use the term now, to refer to LLMs.
- johnohara 8mo ago> The President sits at the top of the classification hierarchy. Constitutionally, and in theory as Commander-In-Chief, perhaps. But in practice, it does not seem so. Worse yet, it's been reported the current President doesn't even bother to read the daily briefing as he doesn't trust it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- handedness 8mo agoIt's not an issue of theory-versus-practice. You're conflating the classification system, established by EO and therefore by definition controlled by the Executive, with the classified products of intel agencies. A particular POTUS's use (or lack thereof) of classified information has no bearing on the nature of the classification system.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoAnd the last president couldn't comprehend it. <shrug>
- djwide 8mo agoI point that out a little bit when I refer to agencies being discouraged from sharing information. The CIA may be worried about losing HUMINT data to the NSA for example. You may be referring to them worrying about compartmentalizing the information away from the president as well which you are right happens to some extent now but shouldn't 'in theory'. Maybe it's a don't ask don't tell. I think Cheney blew the cover of an intel asset though.
- handedness 8mo ago> compartmentalizing the information away from the president as well which you are right happens to some extent now This is nothing new, and has been happening since at least the 1940s, to multiple administrations from both parties. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan...and that's just some of the instances which were publicly documented.