Superpowers, Not Superintelligence

JohnMakin•about 2 hours ago

You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."

What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?

hlynurd•about 1 hour ago

Thanks to people pioneering this I can spend a lot more time on the things I want.

JohnMakin•about 1 hour ago

" It plans his daughter’s recipes and orders the ingredients."

hlynurd•about 1 hour ago

Believe or not people pay for others to do this for themselves.

dfee•about 1 hour ago

i have and continue to build a ton of automations against my life. my goal is to offload more and more of my "life" to it.

- bills? bookkeeping? reading DMARC emails? yeah, i want to do none of it, but i desperately want these chores done.

- spend time with kids? study interesting topics? eat and drink interesting things? i want more of this.

apsurd•about 1 hour ago

life is what happens during all the waiting for life to happen.

exe34•37 minutes ago

That's a nice thought terminating cliché.

We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.

heaney-555•about 1 hour ago

People said this about every new convenience, such as email over physical mail, buying things online instead of in stores, etc. It's a tired argument.

estearum•about 1 hour ago

It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on

apsurd•37 minutes ago

but why is it a tired argument?

You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.

interstice•about 1 hour ago

Freedom to decide? Not that humanity is historically great at deciding what brings itself happiness.

Insanity•about 1 hour ago

Humanity or humans? Individual humans could, but as a collective we make stupid choices.

estearum•about 1 hour ago

Humans are quite bad at doing what brings them (durable) happiness

IncreasePosts•about 1 hour ago

What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?

Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?

JohnMakin•about 1 hour ago

A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.

What a miserable mindset.

bronco21016•17 minutes ago

Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?

For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.

My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.

Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.

Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.

qsera•about 1 hour ago

The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...

siriusastrebe•about 1 hour ago

Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.

After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.

deadbunny•about 1 hour ago

Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?

chrisjj•about 1 hour ago

> Zuckerberg promises an agent that understands you, your goals, everything you care about.

I.e. the most dangerous program you can imagine.

Superpowers, Not Superintelligence

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Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews