Comment by 113
Comment by 113 2 days ago
> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.
Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.
Comment by 113 2 days ago
> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.
Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.
If this was a good answer to mobility, people would prefer the bus over their car. It’s non-deterministic - when will it come? How quick will i get there? Will i get to sit? And it’s operated by an intelligent agent (driver).
Every reason people prefer a car or bike over the bus is a reason non-deterministic agents are a bad interface.
And that analogy works as a glimpse into the future - we’re looking at a fast approaching world where LLMs are the interface to everything for most of us - except for the wealthy, who have access to more deterministic services or actual human agents. How long before the rich person car rental service is the only one with staff at the desk, and the cheaper options are all LLM based agents? Poor people ride the bus, rich people get to drive.
Most of us actually want to get some where to do an activity to enjoy ourselves. The getting there, and activity, are just modalities.
Well the need is to arrive where you are going.
If we were in an imagined world and you are headed to work
You either walk out your door and there is a self driving car, or you walk out of your door and there is a train waiting for you or you walk out of your door and there is a helicopter or you walk out of your door and there is a literal worm hole.
Let's say all take the same amount of time, are equally safe, same cost, have the same amenities inside, and "feel the same" - would you care if it were different every day?
I don't think I would.
Maybe the wormhole causes slight nausea ;)
> Well the need is to arrive where you are going.
In order to get to your destination, you need to explain where you want to go. Whatever you call that “imperative language”, in order to actually get the thing you want, you have to explain it. That’s an unavoidable aspect of interacting with anything that responds to commands, computer or not.
If the AI misunderstands those instructions and takes you to a slightly different place than you want to go, that’s a huge problem. But it’s bound to happen if you’re writing machine instructions in a natural language like English and in an environment where the same instructions aren’t consistently or deterministically interpreted. It’s even more likely if the destination or task is particularly difficult/complex to explain at the desired level of detail.
There’s a certain irreducible level of complexity involved in directing and translating a user’s intent into machine output simply and reliably that people keep trying to “solve”, but the issue keeps reasserting itself generation after generation. COBOL was “plain english” and people assumed it would make interacting with computers like giving instructions to another employee over half a century ago.
The primary difficulty is not the language used to articulate intent, the primary difficulty is articulating intent.
I think it’s pretty obvious but most people would prefer a regular schedule not a random and potentially psychologically jarring transportation event to start the day.
> your car is non-deterministic
it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic.
More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday.
If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way that you predicted? If that is the case, then i would be fine with an LLM interpreted input to drive. Otherwise, how do you know, for sure, that pressing the brakes will stop the car, before you hit somebody in front of you?
of course, you could argue that the input is no longer your moving the brake pads etc - just name a destination and you get there, and that is suppose to be deterministic, as long as you describe your destination correctly. But is that where LLM is at today? or is that the imagined future of LLMs?
Sometimes it doesn't though. Sometimes the engine seizes because a piece of tubing broke and you left your coolant down the road two turns ago. Or you steer off a cliff because there was coolant on the road for some reason. Or the meat sack in front of the wheel just didn't get enough sleep and your response time is degraded and you just can't quite get the thing to feel how you usually do. Ultimately the failure rate is low enough to trust your life on it, but that's just a matter of degree.
For me personally, the latter, but there's definitely people out there that just love driving.
Either way, these silly reductionist games aren't addressing the point: if I just want to get from A to B then I definitely want the absolute minimum of unpredictability in how I do it.
That would ruin the brain placticity.
I wonder now, if everything is always different and suddenly every day would be the same. How many times as terrifying would that be compared to the opposite?
...so that you can get to the supermarket for food, to meet someone you love, meet someone you may or may not love, or to solve the problem of how to get to work; etc.
Your ancestors didn't want horses and carts, bicycles, shoes - they wanted the solutions of the day to the same scenarios above.
As much as I love your point, this is where I must ask whether you even want a corporeal form to contain the level of ego you're describing. Would you prefer to be an eternal ghost?
To dismiss the entire universe and its hostilities towards our existence and the workarounds we invent in response as mere means to an end rather than our essence is truly wild.
Most people need to go somewhere (in a hurry) to make money or food etc which most people don't want to do if they didn't have to, so yeah it is mostly a means to an end.
And yet that money is ultimately spent on more means to ends that are just as inconvenient from another perspective?
My point was that there is no true end goal as long as whims continue. The need to craft yet more means is equally endless. The crafting is the primary human experience, not the using. The using of a means inevitably becomes transparent and boring.
Food -> 'basic needs'... so yeah, Shelter, food, etc. That's why most of us drive. You are also correct to separate Philia and Eros ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love ).
A job is better if your coworkers are of a caliber that they become a secondary family.
Most of us actually drive a car to get somewhere. The car, and the driving, are just a modality. Which is the point.