Hey Zuck We Built Your Office AI | Hacker News Reader

Hey Zuck We Built Your Office AI

blog.algorithmia.com

99 pointsmadrafi22 comments

I wrote a similar system for my own home quite a while ago. It didn't have all the features of Zuckerberg's but it had a lot of things it doesn't too.

The real mystery is why do all the existing home automation systems kind of stink. Although it's not much of a mystery, it's because every company wants to be proprietary and no one wants to work together because if the system is closed they can get you to buy their hardware exclusively.

I'm waiting for pay-as-you-go automation services with good federation between them. That's the only model I see being practical long-term.

Yes - then the single home automation service can be free, and all the functionalities of the system aside from the basic play music one will be unlockable as you pay.

Then whenever you walk into a room that is dark you can get a message on your smart phone - 'access automatic light control for only $.99 a month!'

hmm, maybe I'm cynical.

I imagine it being more like I say "computer, set the lights to forest green", that speech gets crunched by a well trained neural net (or sequence of them) to determine an appropriate reaction, then the fraction of a cent compute costs get added to my monthly bill.

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969

I may have to take advantage of that book recently appearing on a nearby shelf.

A modern take:

My door refused to open.

The sign displayed on the door's handle in my arhud grew more prominent than it had been when I was ignoring it a few moments ago. It briefly flashed an alarming color in time with an almost painful buzzing on my wrist.

A stern and feminine voice began reading the message in my airphones: "Your citizenry is too low to enter this residence. Please report to the nearest reconciliation center or schedule a relocation to a dwelling available at your citizen level."

I spoke aloud: "I am loyal to the party that best serves us as citizens of this great nation. Please allow me express entry to recover my jacket for the cold walk to the nearest reconciliation center."

The stern feminine voice piped back up in its usual fashion of chastising me from a position centered within my skull: "Temperatures for the next hour are expected to remain above 5 degrees Celsius. Your loyalty has been noted and is appreciated by your fellow citizens."

The door remained locked to me.

I went back out into the rain.

Smartthings allows users to write integrations for devices that aren't Samsung. I use quite a few community contributions.

Phenomenal, very cool. Publicly announcing the arrival of everyone in Slack seems a little gross if for instance someone has special circumstances which require them to come in later that may not need to be public information. Or could potentially brood that weird competitive mindset of "I'm the best because I show up at 7:30 when everyone else comes in at 9-9:15, even though I may not be the most skilled". It is definitely fair to say that this stuff being a problem is indicative of something deeper in the office culture anyway, though.

Other than that I love this and 10/10 would pay for it on a monthly basis.

That's always my fear about one day working for a big company. I'm not a good drone. I'm probably the most firable person if you look at me on metrics alone.

I work for a company of ~120 people who are owned by a fairly giant company (I think ~5000 but could be way off, I forget) and we don't treat people that way. You really have to work hard to vet the environment you're going into as an employee, but it pays unlimited dividends when you get it right. It has taken me several times now.

Zuck is right (and before Gates in 1995 "The Road Ahead" book). We need a common API, so that AI agents can interact with various types of hardware (home automation, IoT) as well as other AI agents over the internet.

I propose we should use JSON rest based simple API with simple english words. To agree on things, AI agents should be able to bid against each other, like in auctions.

In Bill 1995 vision, every interaction costs (micro payment). We all learned how the free internet with WWW sponsored by advertisement et al won over his pay-as-you-go The Microsoft Network as found in Win95. But how will advertisement work with agents? How will big search engine providers get payed in an mainly AI environment. This has to be solved. Also Zuck and Bill wanted to have their own locally installed agent on their own hardware, something that has charm but is contrary to 2010s trend of software-as-service/cloud. But I can imagine that in a few years, our personslized AI agents surf the internet and interact with other agents, and we less and less visit websites or apps ourself, but directly interact with our agent.

This is so awesome. I want you guys to package it up and sell it for $5.99. Or $1.99/month. I would buy if it were zero config; we've got lots of tablets lying around and would hack it into plenty of different use cases if it were up and running.

At any rate, nice work!

Expounding the benefits of humans living like machines so that machines might be more useful to humans. I think the carrot is very much that we are subduing time to our control.

Maybe this is the way it should all go ... but the depths of me resonate much more with finding the simple ways to be in harmony with the world.

Akin to a closed form formula where an algorithm may have been.

This isn't a good idea. Productize it.

> "We have some cleanup to do on the code before we’re ready to share the sample app"

Has this been shared now?

I don't think Zuck or anyone else thought that the AI demoed was particularly hard to build...

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