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"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is n

• dfhvneoieno 6mo ago
  [dead]
• fl4ppyb3ngt 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • sdenton4 6mo ago
    It's the next step removed from the tablet based ordering that has taken over in restaurants. Like those tablets, it won't be everywhere, but its easy to imagine it being ubiquitous, especially in chain stores.
    • alfiedotwtf 6mo ago
      Tablets? We now have QR codes on tables that point to the menu online, including payment gateway.
  • jmcgough 6mo ago
    I can't believe you made a throwaway to pretend to be a HN commenter just to defend your AI store. This is like Scott Adams behavior.
• Mordisquitos 6mo ago
  “Again, we are not doing this because we want the Torment Nexus to be the future. We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running the Torment Nexus.”
  • astrange 6mo ago
    The Torment Nexus joke is kind of undermined by obviously being a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HGTTG, where the joke was that nothing bad actually happened when they used it on Zaphod.
    • mesofile 6mo ago
      Not sure if this is a spoiler, it’s been a while since I read those books, but if memory serves the only reason Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to trick him, and naturally for this universe’s version of the TPV he was the most important being in it, and in telling him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB’s own view of himself, leaving him unharmed and a little extra smug. At some further point in the plot this fact is revealed, not sure if it’s the same book, but I remember it as a hilarious deflationary moment for the character.
      • frm88 6mo ago
        Tangential: I always pictured Zaphod to look like Frank Zappa. No idea why.
    • tsunagatta 6mo ago
      I've never thought it was a reference to that at all, I thought it was a reference to a I-have-no-mouth-but-I-must-scream-scenario.
      • jmcgough 6mo ago
        A lot of things it could be a direct reference to, but the obvious one is Palantir, which is named after the seeing stones used to spy on people by evil antagonists in Lord of the Rings.
• anon84873628 6mo ago
  Not for the economic opportunity of building AI-run retail stores. For the much larger economic opportunity of selling AI's to run retail stores! Pickaxes and shovels and whatnot.
• Waterluvian 6mo ago
  I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. Actions have value.
  • bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    >I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. well, yeah that is the world the AI guys want...
    • Apocryphon 6mo ago
      The opposite, actually. They hardly want to give away tokens for free!
      • hn_acc1 6mo ago
        They want the grand total of humanity's knowledge, from which they create tokens, to be given to them for free, though..
      • dugidugout 6mo ago
        For the tech bros, the tokens are the actions and the prompts are the words.
  • mountainb 6mo ago
    Many actions have a negative value. If I give two toddlers ball-peen hammers, release them into a window store, and then close the front door while I wait in the parking lot, was my action likely to create value or likely to destroy value?
    • jagged-chisel 6mo ago
      For whom? The employees will get more paid hours as they clean up. You have created value for them!
      • 6mo ago
• ben_w 6mo ago
  I'm not saying you should take them seriously*, but if you were to take them seriously, that when they say "we believe this future is coming regardless" they do in fact believe this, well, how can I put it? Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life expectancy. * I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn carriages!"
  • notahacker 6mo ago
    tbf this is less preparing for inevitable death by writing a will and more preparing for inevitable death by founding a startup which blogs about euthanizing small animals...
• Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  To be fair, they're running this with oversight, the blog states they're ensuring the people employed are actually properly employed with the parent company. You know for sure that someone WILL run this experiment without those oversights, so while their "care" is probably more about liability there is still some truth to what they say.
  • akdev1l 6mo ago
    If these guys succeed and this thing blows up, do you think they would not stop all this oversight and whatever “moral” boundaries they have now to make more money? I do not.
    • Quarrelsome 6mo ago
      i mean if you're exploring and you find smth cool then you run with it. But I would imagine the people doing it are exploring, its their financial backers who will be looking to monetise. I feel more comfortable that the people exploring seem to have their head screwed on and don't appear to be dismissive of the harm they might cause.
• scotty79 6mo ago
  I'm all for replacing CEOs with AI.
• HPsquared 6mo ago
  I'll file this under "Resistance is futile".
• elif 6mo ago
  It is moral to throw your toddler into the pool so that later in life they are less likely to drown.
  • jdlshore 6mo ago
    Um, yes? Very much so. Infant swimming self-rescue courses are life-saving if you live in an area with a lot of swimming pools, especially if you have one of your own. E.g., https://www.infantswim.com/ https://www.infantswim.com/
    • b2w 6mo ago
      At best, ISR covers the short term. I see these kids come on deck and enter the water and its hard to not notice their development is behind to those of their peers that went to a swim club that was proper learn to swim to thrive in the water as opposed to just that survive mentality. They are the most watched in case something happens. So yea, don't just throw em in.
      • tayo42 6mo ago
        > development is behind to those of their peers that went to a swim club 2 year olds are behind already?
• jonas21 6mo ago
  > Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly, won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you can point to results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?
• insane_dreamer 6mo ago
  I think it's actually useful to see how AIs behave in such situations. It's going to happen, and understanding what AIs do is good to try to mitigate areas or actions that could be dangerous. It's hard to guard against the unknown if they're unknown.
• beloch 6mo ago
  I once saw an interview with a guy who was into extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature. He said something to the effect of, "I like challenging people's conception of what humans are." I translated this as, "I did a dumb thing, but now that I'm getting the attention I was after I need to look smart." For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our stuff."
  • Barbing 6mo ago
    “We also won’t be first against the wall when the revolution comes (see this very blog for proof of innocence)” This is going through some people’s minds the more pushback grows (see Altman molotov, Maine data center moratorium)
    • HumblyTossed 6mo ago
      For decades we moved to a knowledge based economy, now we have perversely wealthy people saying they're coming for those jobs. The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.
      • topheroo 6mo ago
        Comment of the week
      • hn_acc1 6mo ago
        Especially since many of them are some of the brightest minds around.
        • Barbing 6mo ago
          If (1) many bright and very online people are going to lose their jobs, and (2) the response has not been mass unionization, might I rethink [1] a more likely future of work or rethink [2] the psychology of the average/collective knowledge workforce, or... "where union" in short. Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors who'll go... maybe too focused on immediate needs... a belief unionization is the wrong response... (and I'm not advocating for anything in particular btw)
• pajamasam 6mo ago
  I honestly thought the whole thing was satire and that that line was a riff on OpenAI.
• cyanydeez 6mo ago
  "Guys, the Future All Knowning AI is forcing us to do this; don't blame us, blame the super intelligent future indistinguishable from magic!"
• orochimaaru 6mo ago
  The narrative was quite dystopian. But we are half way there now anyway
• andy99 6mo ago
  I don’t find this disingenuous. The more typical AI fondation model company claim of “it’s so dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand access” is what I think is BS. I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understand something, which is what this seems to be about. I also don’t see anything wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the limitations.
  • Anon34234235 6mo ago
    [flagged]
• Lammy 6mo ago
  > When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want? “It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom.” -- Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)
• yowlingcat 6mo ago
  We can fault them individually for such corny and groan inducing deceit, but we can't fault them for society's role in rewarding the highest profile and most wealthy founders (OAI/Anthropic) taking the exact same approach with optics. I am about to go on a long rant, but there is so much money sloshing around the capital allocation machine going towards a vision of the AI managed and optimized future that the propaganda machine for these rose colored delusions must work in overtime. What disappoints me is the question of where the heck are the bears? Did they all go into hibernation 5 years ago when QE gave the retail kindergartener a handgun to pump low quality tickers to the moon? have we just societally accepted that everything should be a hyperreal version of sports gambling now and the world is and ought to be an efficient market of hyperstition? I may be old and grumpy saying this, but this all sounds dumb and corny. I would like some of the very capable traders who make money repricing mispriced assets to find a way to make money deflating this bubble and bring this environment back to sanity. And I say this as someone who likes the capabilities of AI but continue to see it do little to none of the hard work solving incompressible problems that continue to create and retain enterprise value. To get off my soapbox for a second and get back to your quoted passage -- what they're really saying is "We are working very hard to make this future coming, and we think so little of your intelligence that we believe you'll fall for the fear tactic of believing it's inevitable, ignoring the fact that it won't happen without someone's hands. And in this case, it is very much our hands, which are incentivized to not just do it but to do it so well that we ensure we do everything possible to make this happen. Part of which means persuading you that it is guaranteed to succeed. If we ever let the honest truth slip that what we're proposing is extremely hard to pull off with pure AI and we're just going to be a any other commercial real estate investor like anyone else, the jig is up." That's what every single one of these kinds of hypocritical navel gazing faux-concern proclamations amount to for me. Astroturf.
• teo_zero 6mo ago
  A form of self-fulfilling prophecy?
• BrenBarn 6mo ago
  Amen to that. I would go further and say that there is just no such thing as "this future is coming regardless" once you get out of the realm of physical facts. One of the things that by turns depresses and enrages me about so much punditry (especially in tech) is this notion that there is some sort of inevitable socio-techno-psychological force propelling human society in certain directions regardless of the will of actual humans. Nonsense. We as humans make our society; it is nothing but what we make of it; we can make it what we want. As you point out, people who say otherwise are usually really saying "too bad for you who don't want the future to be this way, because I do want it to be this way and I'm working to make it happen".