Item — HN Reader

"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 not for economic opportunity.

We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."

I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high ground. 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? Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? Literally anything else.

Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they see one?

19 comments

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."

“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)

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.

> The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.

It doesn't, it won't, and it shouldn't. It's not explored in game theory and criminal justice tries to conceal this but the starving will kill and eat each other long before they organize and mob the wealthy.

It plays out in every prison riot, governmental collapse, and other condition of anarchy.

This idea that the poor will mob the rich is feel-good Hollywood idealism that has been wholly undermined by identity politics. The poor will sooner kill and eat you just because you're easier to reach.

Especially since many of them are some of the brightest minds around.

They're experts at divide and conquer. They'll probably be able to convince us that we did this to each other.

Just like they convinced the younger generation that "boomers" stole their future.

Comment of the week

Freakanomics podcast had a recent episode regarding Cheating with PEDS, and interviewed the (former) head of the Enhanced Games. At one point, he discussed the benefit for society because athletes would be monitored for 5-years post performance.

To me, it seemed like a modern day tech-take of human cock-fighting.

In my opinion, the problem with PEDS isn't adults taking them if they would just admit to taking them.

The problem is with adolescents taking them. Adolescent boys see a really nice immediate payoff for taking PEDS (better musculature and better sports performance->more popular) while the downsides are in the future. It's really hard to fight that.

Even when I was in high school several decades ago, we had a handful of people on PEDS. And we were a tiny school with no significant sports programs. I can't imagine what it's like now with social media pushing everything.

Honestly PEDS are stigmatized and under-researched for the performance enhancing aspect. They have undoubtable side effects - but how much, why, etc. is kind of meh from what I saw when I was looking into this, bro science is best you can get. Few studies here and there giving people modes test boosts and measuring athletic performance.

Not saying we should be promoting them, but if we can eventually get to the point where we eliminate the really bad side effects and get most of the benefits it's going to be a great thing for everyone, the next thing after GLP-1.

> 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."

Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically proving the artist’s point.

I think that depends on what the "extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature" was.

Let's just say the "artist" was never again going to be able to walk normally, wear normal pants, or sit without a doughnut pillow. It was a voluntary disability.

> 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)

I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. Actions have value.

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?

is it not both?

create value because the windows have to be replaced and employees are paid for their labor in doing that.

destroy value bc they -1 inventory each time a window is broken

For whom? The employees will get more paid hours as they clean up. You have created value for them!

FIRE!

-crowded theater (negative value example)

Words can be pretty much actions depending on who you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

>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...

The opposite, actually. They hardly want to give away tokens for free!

Words are acts, as formalized in speech act theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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...

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.

It is moral to throw your toddler into the pool so that later in life they are less likely to drown.

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/

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.

I'll file this under "Resistance is futile".

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".

I'm all for replacing CEOs with AI.

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.

A form of self-fulfilling prophecy?

I honestly thought the whole thing was satire and that that line was a riff on OpenAI.

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.

> 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?

"Guys, the Future All Knowning AI is forcing us to do this; don't blame us, blame the super intelligent future indistinguishable from magic!"

The narrative was quite dystopian. But we are half way there now anyway

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.

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.

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.