> Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
Don’t think of it as work, but of what a human would want to spend time doing. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788736, a commentor describes how his kids love using the “paper computer” prototype he built. They are not working, they are playing and learning and experimenting and creating. Things that humans like to do.
To some degree, that's what one had w/ Apple's Newton Intelligence on the MessagePad --- it was "just" fancy pattern-matching, but mostly it worked, and the UI and implementation were quite good, and it kept me organized all through college.
Mentioning the Newton may be anathema to the discussion (it seems to bring up the usual jokes, etc.) but I was thinking too that the Macintosh (or the Xerox Alto if you like, or the Mother of All Demos) tried to move us in that direction by "skeuomorphising" the computer interface—make it look like the more familiar "real world". The Newton pushed further. It seems to have been on the mind of at least a few people at Apple.
It sounds like the author is on the same track, has the same mindset. And I like.
I am also reminded of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. It is not exactly what the author describes but, if the book had a computer backend, it also divorces the user from the computer interface we have come to know. Perhaps for me some future (better) local LLM within such a book is what I want. A kind of companion I ask questions of…
(I mean I suppose I should just do what was posted a day or to ago to the Ask HN: and put a local LLM behind a messaging app and I could just converse with it wherever I am. Tangent: I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a personal LLM that has context stretching back to my earliest days—were I to have started conversing with this synthetic companion at a young age. Imagine the lifetime of context where the LLM knows my habits, how I've changed over the years. I suppose this is nightmare fuel for a number of you.)
Other copies of the Primer do have a computer backend.
There are basically three versions of the book:
1) The ones developed for a few rich kids. These are partially automated, but backed by gig workers. They get what we might call (if you'll pardon the term) "Actually Indians" AI (augmented by the regular type).
2) The one our protagonist gets. This is one of the books from #1, but the distinctive feature here is that an early gig worker (the book calls these "'ractors" when they're doing this kind of work) the protagonist draws takes a special interest in her and intentionally keeps drawing jobs for her over a period of several years. This continuity and personal care by a single real person is what sets it apart and makes her experience so excellent.
3) The mass-market version that's entirely computerized, no human touch. This version brainwashes a fuckload of kids into becoming the "mouse army", and that's really all we see as far as what it can do: something really bad (if convenient for our protagonist).
The message of the book is 100% the opposite of "automated learning-books are amazing". It's "tech for learning sucks ass and/or is outright dangerous if you rely only on it, and a real human tutor who cares about a kid is the best thing around even in a crazy high-tech future-world".
Charles de Lint had an intelligent book in his fantasy novel _Jack the Giant Killer_ (or maybe its sequel) --- I've tried doing the conversing/chatting thing w/ an LLM a couple of times, but always got annoyed more than amused.
What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a woodworking joint which has no precedent.
Yes, the skeumorphism angle is an interesting one, and one which is surprisingly absent in the _ur_ description of a stylus equipped computing device, the slates/tablets from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ --- this sort of thing seems to be coming back around --- a recent Kindle Scribe firmware update add shape recognition. I'd be _very_ pleased if my new Kindle Scribe Coloursoft could fully become a replacement for my Newton....
I think you're right that the use case for an LLM is still rather niche. It's perhaps still worth exploring though as they may well improve over time.
Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful.
For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant. I already knew the basics of op-amps and analog computing but was surprised at a lot of the new things I discovered only by way of the LLM saying (for example), "Hey, here's a nice way to get your reference voltages…" and the project benefited from it (and I learned about a new chip/device/technique).
Yes, they do work well as a stand-in for the "competent technician with skill in the pertinent art and and fully aware of all prior art" (to use wording like to the patent application standard).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
Because it was a profit making venture for car companies. Suburbs are horrifically inefficient, they survive by the twisted "communism" of cannibalizing the dense urban tax bases to support the sprawling, expensive to service and maintain, isolating flatlands.
Not so fast: I would say that the move to suburbs was initially driven by a thirst for homeownership with luxurious lawns, coupled with electric streetcars and other rail-based transport.
It was only later that the almighty combustion engine and tire companies forcibly replaced streetcars with buses and trucks, that cars began their hegemonic domination of suburbia. The National Highway System decrees didn't hurt, either, but highways were built in the USA with an ulterior motive of national defense.
It also happened during a period where cities were polluted, noisy, and the middle-class housing was largely cramped tenements. Basically all of this has been/is being mitigated these days. City-center housing now looks more like luxury loft living than tenements (though this gives us a big problem with ‘missing middle’ housing where there’s very little housing available that is suitable for families where everything is decrepit slums or luxury 1 and 2 bedroom condos). Pollution has been largely mitigated with catalytic converters and, now, EVs. And electrification helps deal with noise pollution as well through getting rid of engine noise (especially for motorized appliances like leaf-blowers).
Meanwhile, traffic and the stigma around drunk driving (which wasn’t nearly as strong or strictly enforced before the 90s), have quickly taken much of the bloom off the rose of car-dependent lifestyles. I predict the growth of micromobility options will continue to make cities even more attractive as well by improving coverage for areas where transit can’t go and generally improve the throughput of city streets and reduce the space needed for parking cars for people who live within “not-quite walking but feels silly to drive” distance.
The big gap in the US at least is simply a lack of cities! Everything is still concentrated in a handful of legacy urban centers that survived the waves of “urban renewal” and it’s simply too expensive to house all the people who want to live there without turning them into Hong Kong sized megalopolises, which starts to introduce new problems from overwhelming density. “Urban” development patterns need to expand out to more of the country to take demand pressure off the 5 or 6 American cities with decent mass transit.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.