A serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters.
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something.
This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited.
They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
A related point that I've been making privately for at least ten years to anyone that would listen, is that we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions.
No single human could design a rocket to go to the moon or keep all Wallmart stores supplied on a daily basis. Moreover when something like the CEO or US president changes, the policies and actions change a bit but the majority actually stays the same. This is collective intelligence embodied in the organization and its institutional memory. This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.
Our cells and neurons act based on local chemical gradients and electrical signals and we wouldn't call any single one of those particularly intelligent. Yet collectively they produce human intelligence and even what we call consciousness!
I've made that point before. From an "alignment" perspective, AIs and corporations have many of the same problems. Corporations, according to Milton Friedman, have the sole duty of increasing their profits.[1] This is a key document in the history of modern conservatism.[2]
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood.
That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
“ This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.”
“ and even what we call consciousness!”
This misunderstands the point of the so-called Chinese room thought experiment. You want to conclude that consciousness is functional, but you cite a thought experiment which argues it is not, and then assert the thought experiment is wrong because it disagrees with your preconceived notion of consciousness.
Thanks for the reply. I was hoping to get some debate going and have my thoughts challenged in order to see how they hold up under scrutiny. You're right that I believe in Functionalism and Strong AI and in previous comment I only really stated my belief so please allow me to try and make a bit of an argument for it. My position probably falls under the "System reply" to the Chinese Room argument although I feel it's more restrictive in some aspects so perhaps it corresponds to a particular subtype (I don't know as I haven't read enough in the area).
My basic argument is that human *intelligence* (and understanding - I consider understanding as part of intelligence and consciousness separately but I can see how many might group understanding with consciousness and leave intelligence on its own) is a form of collective intelligence. Individual neurons acting based on local chemical and electrical signals collectively produce behaviour that we call intelligent, i.e. it can solve problems, respond to questions, etc ... . A particular configuration of neurons acting together I will call a particular software or algorithm (I understand that separating the software from the neural substrate in that way is part of what's in dispute, particularly by Searle, but that's my belief and what I feel is required to make the mapping to the Chinese Room argument). The Chinese Room thought experiment then is trying to refute Strong AI by arguing that the person in the Chinese Room has no understanding of the exchange with the outside world because they are just manipulating symbols incomprehensible to them. I agree that the person has no understanding. That person on their own would not be able to string together a sensible reply without the instruction cards. However another person with the same instruction cards, i.e. algorithm, would be able to reply sensibly, pass a Chinese Turing test, etc ..., thus demonstrating that the intelligence/understanding resides in the algorithm. The person is just an execution substrate. The mistake in the Chinese Room argument is identifying the locus of understanding in the person, which imho is failure of imagination. It's akin to saying that humans can have no understanding because each individual neuron has no understanding of our actions, something which the existence proof of human intelligence refutes.
What then of consciousness? Here I also have some beliefs which I'm happy to write down but in my assessment they're less substantiated so make of them what you will. I saw some things by Joscha Bach recently and I liked what he said about agents and consciousness as a form self-recognition of the agent as an entity in the environment and predictive modeling of future states of that entity in order to achieve the agents goals and realise some form of agency. I don't know where neuroscience and cognitive science stand on this but made sense to me as a sensible model of consciousness. Therefore I would even go so far as to say that I believe that entities such as the United States of America (and any country or institution really) are probably conscious in some form, because they are aware of themselves, model themselves, and try to project their agency in the environment that they find themselves in. We are not directly aware of this because we are like single neurons in our brain and this happens at a scale much larger than us. Moreover I suspect that as you go up each rung on the emergence ladder, the temporal scale of the phenomena gets an order slower as that level is composed of the interactions at the level below it. So the speed of interactions of our neurons is an order faster than our conscious processes and similarly the emergent bodies and institutions that we form part of act an order slower so their processes are more difficult for us to perceive.
Schematically then my beliefs organise roughly as follows:
- intelligence = algorithm: think neural network weights you can download of HuggingFace
- consciousness = self-aware world model + state: I speculate that the same NN world model weights running with separate state would perceive themselves as separate entities
I mostly agree with you, but referencing Michael Levin, I'll contend that even individual cells have quite some intelligence. Granted, different from ours, but really good at solving the kind of problems cells have to solve.
Agreed. Michael Levin's work and discoveries are mind blowing! I was actually referencing that with the "electrical signals" nod (as well as neuronal activity) and Alan Turing's reaction-diffusion theory of morphogenesis with the chemical gradients. I'm not a molecular biologist so i don't know anything about the details, but the emergence of global phenomena from these local interactions fascinates me.
There's no intelligence without teleology. Intelligence and information are only meaningful concepts of you assert (necessarily without any evidence except the circular kind) that some differences matter.
Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway
Intelligence is only meaningful with respect to a goal or set of goals.
I think organizations' intelligence can only be called superhuman if you ascribe them their own inscrutable goals, different from what people want their goals to be.
But why would you do that?
It's true that a lot of the debate about AI alignment - the good parts, anyway - also apply to human institutions.
Because that is what actually gets pursued. The set of effective goals an organization is distinctly different from those of any of the individuals in that organization.
You're missing what I'm trying to say. There are no goals in nature. Agency and goal-directedness is something we ascribe to things.
The set of things an organization ends up doing may be distinctly different from those of the individuals, but that does in no way oblige us to ascribe agency to the organization on its own.
You're still not getting it. "Entity", "survival", these are still arbitrary or circularly defined terms. You decided what an entity is (i.e where one thing ends and a different thing begins) and what the essence which "survives" is (i.e. why it's a big deal whether there's a different chunk of nucleic acids similar but not identical to my own floating around 200 years from now).
These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
> And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.
A storm can appear to act with purpose too, or a planet orbiting a star, yet I doubt you assign it agency. It's fundamentally your choice to assign something agency or not, whether you are right or wrong to do so, is not an empirical question. It is a teleological one. "Call me out" all you want, this is very basic.
I kinda agree that the financial system is intelligent in the problem solving sense but disagree that it is pursuing a particular goal in the sense that institutions and organisations are.
It's more akin to an ecosystem to me. In nature we also have ecosystems organising and reusing resources but I would only ascribe intelligence to living organisms pursuing individual goals with agency.
Haven't thought too hard about the distinction though so happy to be shown a better principle.
collective intelligence is not a superhuman intelligence.
Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.
Not really. If they did, markets would be more stable. Look at the prices of commodities such as copper. Prices swing up and own by as much as 3x, despite both supply and demand not changing much. That's the problem. If supply and demand have a lot of inertia, and thus lag, the feedback loop becomes unstable. This is basic control theory. Hedging with derivatives was supposed to add stability, but doesn't work very well for that purpose.
the price swings are part of the market's reaction to real life situations.
The opposite of a market solving a resource allocation problem is the command economy, where some (small) group people are tasked with decisions like how much copper to actually produce. Instead of price swings, you get shortages.
In any case, the point in my parent comment is that crowd intelligence solves some problems that cannot be easily solved by human intelligence (command economy vs free markets). But i would not call crowd intelligence a super intelligence.
Yeah, wasn't claiming that it was particularly novel or divine insight, otherwise I might have tried to publish a paper about it. I was just recounting my experience on this matter.
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions.
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
They're de facto superhuman. Even with the friction and stupidity, they still have more agency than an individual human and process a much bigger entropic footprint for both information and physical resources.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
The biological systems that support human intelligence are notoriously messy and work together only tenuously with a great many failure modes, including "process for the sake of process"
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited.
That's a feature, not a bug. CEOs should be focusing on the key goals of the business at a high level.
Having an inexhaustible AI CEO that can pay attention to every little thing in the company could easily turn into a micromanagement nightmare.
"I noticed your key pressed were down 27% last week and your agents sat idle 3 nights in a row. And honestly? The thing to hold on to is that it's not a small thing, it's a load-bearing reduction in your output. Let's try to minimize the blast radius with some belt-and-suspenders productivity tips from the bullet point list below:"
Some of the non native English speakers on my team have started to use “blast radius” and “shape of” in the course of casual conversation. It’s unnerving.
To some extent, the AI may have adopted some of the expressions because they were in its training corpus enough (ie. People used these expressions before). Might be attributable to Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon instead of people copying AI.
I have use both for years. Elixir and functional languages talk about the shape of data. and blast radius has been used at the last 7 companies I have worked at when talking about impact of a negative thing, usually an incident/outage.
The expression makes sense (a not dissimilar "trickle down" got accepted...). But used like in the text above, "the blast radius of your reduced productivity", it better be satire.
You again anthropologizing AI. AI does not have to make everyone busy to look useful like for some human managers, when right priorities are set.
Imagine a manager who knows that company needs in a long term support person even if it's not busy at the moment. Because AI has data of historical precedents and actual calculations. And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees, actual humans who perform the actual work and who benefit from good CEO decisions and most importantly the AI CEO which does not gave to be paid gazilion dolars just to burn the company to the ground and leave with golden parachute. I think there is a good insight that AI has very high bandwidth, that human management does not have, no more 2 week meeting marathons just to get everyone on same page and to get all the inputs.
> And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees,
You’re just describing a company owned by employees who manage themselves. The AI isn’r relevant to your story other than being a proxy and note keeping apparatus for them.
We have some interesting evidence from AI agents. People used to make the plan with a stronger and more expensive model, and then use a cheaper model to do the "grunt work" of implementing it.
But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
> plan with a stronger and more expensive model, and then use a cheaper model to do the "grunt work
Doesn't this sound like the model that led to bloated poor software produced by code monkey sweatshops where an architect fobbed off implementation work to grunts?
It always brings me back to the anecdote that QQ had 6000+ devs and WeChat was built by a tiny core of elite engineers (by imitating WhatsApp)
Really? I'd love to read some write ups on this because I'm still doing it the old way. I was going to say that corporate experience runs counter to this but maybe not; you think the architect is more important than the developer, but actually there have been shifts over time to recognise ICs more and keep them in their roles while managers are more generic. Interesting food for thought!
On a serious note I think that this fact is not understood by many.
There is no such thing as common sense without shared assumptions. So if those shared assumptions are incorrect or not given at all the output of the models will be nonsensical. In order to truly act human there is a need to experience humanity from the first person.
This is why I think technology will get more and more invasive. Meta glasses now, personal agent devices later and neural implants after that with data sharing enabled.
Your point is well taken, but one thing stood out to me.
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
This is actually my #1 problem with frontier LLMs. They are plenty smart, but they have no true long term memory, and their context window is not nearly enough for a complex system like a corporation. When my project gets big enough and I'm using a lot of /compact, the LLMs always have the same failure point: they fail to pay attention to something.
When they figure this out, I think it's going to be a very, very big moment.
Meanwhile, I have the opposite problem. An errant word or phrase and they hang onto it forever, completely corrupting all future work because they can’t ignore irrelevant (or wrong) details/errors of their own design.
It’s called using systems of record. I use redmine and discourse. Jointly with my stack of agents (COO) (managed by four very high trust humans via OWUI interacting with scoped Hermes profiles ).
I’m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero
I hope legislation is never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation or become it's legal director. With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it's bots all the way down.
>With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it becomes bots all the way down.
Corporations already exist to limit liability and accountability. This would be an extension of their current purpose not some weird deviation from.
this is already possible using common corporate tax & trust strategies. see Wyoming Asset Protection Trust (WAPT), purpose trusts, donor advised funds.
The funny thing is Decentralised Autonomous organisations (DAO) under Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies had similar goals originally. I do not know where they stand and if ever a useful DAO was created.
If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt
Eh, it’s nothing new in general. My software development (both at work and private) is being done by teams of semi-antagonistic agents. I only get to see code after the grumpy reviewer bot ran out of reasons to be grumpy and the pedantic formalist ensured all specs are still adhered to. Saves on the most expensive resource.
You're probably totally innocent, but this comes across as being AI-written, especially in the context of an AI problem and when your response is pro-AI. For the next 3-12 months (maybe more, we'll see), I suspect you'll have a lot more success if you shy away from those speech patterns.
Hmm it's being done in a less cheesy way than AI does it.
AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.
It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.
This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)
Because it's only half true. Yeah we've used phrases like those before, but if you ignore certain very specific phrases or characters for a moment, a lot of the more ambiguous things people are identifying as AI-speak comes from mixing jargon from different domains in a way humans normally don't do. Like the short punchy sentences are from marketing, not comments or technical writing like they've started showing up in.
Or at least he's being unintentionally influenced by it. Just out of curiosity I jumped a few years back in his comments looking for that pattern, and I don't really see it.
By pure luck I even landed on a comment that uses that same word with a similar sentiment, except back then he wrote it as a full non-punchy sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31414288
> Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI.
Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point.
The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
It's been weird to see the face of a bunch of youtubers I've followed for years without any idea what they look like (mostly history/military history/engineering type stuff), it used to be video/photo's/diagrams with them providing a voice over but because of the sheer quantity of absolute shite/slop mirroring that style they've started appearing on camera as quick "proof of not AI" check.
For that type of content YT is essentially completely ruined if you didn't already follow the good ones because finding them in the absolute sea of dross has become way more difficult.
A friend showed me a video, put out by a local news organization, that started with an attractive woman, standing in the place being discussed, speaking into a microphone.
Cool. Standard local interest story.
Then, it cut to a photo montage, with “her” voice, continuing the story.
Except it was AI. It wasn’t especially successful. You could hear the “tics” from the AI.
It's long READMEs with 3 punchlines per paragraph for a project best described has "I found these 4 thingies, all of them had compromises, so I told Claude: merge the 4, no compromises!"
And every issue, every PR you open, about every small improvement or new feature, is the same.
Dumb people want to impress by using words others might not understand.
Smart people want others to understand them.
In early days of Internet, it was a domain of smart people.
And native English speakers have no problem communicating with people from Ex-Comecon countries with vey little English knowledge.
Like hell we can't. Unsophisticated plebs (not you) viewing sophistication with suspicion is nothing new. And certainly no reason to demote one's standards.
Long live the em-dash. Or en-dash surrounded by spaces if you prefer UK style (which I do).
Sigh. I did write that personally, just as I have all my other HN posts. I'm moderately well known, and not anonymous. See www.animats.com.
I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were dismissed. Hence the somewhat out of character rhetoric.
We have organizations of people for the usual reasons. Scale. Specialization. Robustness against failure and errors. All those wins apply to structured groups of LLMs. So this has a reasonable chance of being useful. It's expensive at the moment, but probably cheaper than the management team it may replace.
For some reason, this idea seems to upset people. Unclear why. Comments?
I read the line and thought it was AI, and then saw the username and figured it wouldn't be. I find my writing being influenced by LLM patterns as well, because that's basically all the writing that exists these days. I don't like how it erodes my own voice because I keep reading the writings of this one single author all day, every day.
FWIW, I thought it was human written. Pangram also said that it's 100% human written.
More likely, they're all wrong on this accusation. A bit concerning to see how many of them are throwing out a false positive like this. Makes me wonder how many of them are falling for actual AI traps in the real world. :)
I am actually with you here. Such a system probably needs to be battle tested in a specific domain of business to see where the deficiencies at this stage are.
Problem is, no matter how many sub-agents you break the LLM into it's still stochastic parrots all the way down. I've seen no evidence that compartmentalised harnesses can reach solutions that a monolithic harnesses cannot, so I'm thinking the compartmentalisation is just an excuse to throw more tokens into the token furnace - it doesn't unlock a step change in capability. If there is evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it.
There have been some successful attempts to do science like this (https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario). Denario generated 1k+ "solutions" on its way to winning the FAIR Universe challenge, and they all had to be fed through a fitness function of some kind to assess them. It also got stuck on a local maximum and had to be kicked in the ass by a human to get it off that.
When writing software, that fitness function is relatively closed (when I run it, does it do what I want?). With something as open-ended as managing a business... might as well roll dice, IMO.
My belief is that 20's LLMs have a lot in common with 90's GAs: the more clearly we can define "success" for a given task (the fitness function) the more successful they can be. Open-ended problems are somewhat beyond them right now, and, I suspect, forever.
(The comment that's currently at the top of the discussion, about making an "AI Boss" that remembered everything about the company, and fed the user three tasks a day? That's not an AI Boss, that's an AI Assistant with different framing.)
Well, you mentioned Gas Town — that deserves an immediate reflexive downvote :P
I actually upvoted your post. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I was interested to see more discussion about it, and that felt worthy of an upvote.
As for the reaction against the idea, I see it from two angles. Is the standard corporate hierarchy / architecture really the optimal organization principle for AI? Or is that just a skeuomorphism to make this project seem more serious than it really is? Maybe Yegge did us a favor by mapping to Mayors & Polecats, forcing people to question if it really is the correct organizational hierarchy?
The other angle is heresy here - HN is full of employees now. There is little incentive for employees to be interested in what a C-suite does, and we see that with the comments about CEOs needing to be six foot and walk impressively. Employees have no interest in AI organization principles that optimize them away and highlights their obsolescence. I am surprised there hasn't been more discussion about how this specific project optimizes away the C-suite humans instead - I would have thought that could have had some appeal to employees, at least until those people realized it makes employees a swarm that works for AI leadership.
As for AI organization, the organizational mapping needs to be productive, not affectation or cargo-culting. That's not peripheral — that's load-bearing. Especially in a corporation model, you can find the organization layers only create busywork with lots of unnecessary middle managers. You don't want your AI C-suite swarm burning tokens on endless meetings about what should be in the upcoming meeting... especially not at Fable API pricing.
It saddens me that we're banning speech patterns on HN, not discussing arguments. I have seen this in another thread yesterday(?), where somebody was accused of being an LLM based on speech patterns and downvoted, no further evidence needed. This site used to be above that level.
It’s not about the LLM usage. It was such a dumb construction:
> <totally vague statement>. This matters.
Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it.
The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
The site used to not be under constant assault of low effort LLM submissions and low effort LLM comments. That people start getting cranky about that is just normal.
Not in the slightest. I didn't touch the voting functionality and tried to be as nice as possible. I saw an opportunity to make somebody's life better for reasons it didn't seem they were aware of, since their speech seemed similar enough to certain AI idioms that I thought it would be demonized, and the fact that they wrote it anyway suggests they didn't know.
As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently.
> banning speech patterns
AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
I mean on the one hand it is annoying because everybody has speech patterns, I like to say "I mean" and "on the one hand" a lot. On the other hand it seems a sort of self-protective recoil, nobody wants to spend a lot of time talking to an AI. Our jobs and society already make us spend way too much time and effort doing that!
On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway.
I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.
The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.
> Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication.
So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
It’s the whole internet, it’s not an HN problem. The AI industry is little by little invading and destroying every space where humans gather, removing everything that made genuine human interactions interesting and worthwhile.
(Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146