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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

The washing machine is one of the biggest game changer in the world, allowing people to suddenly have, like a noble used to have, the equivalent of a servant to do a tremendously costly chore. Without the slavery part.

I think AI has the same potential: filling administrative work, walking the complexity of an information overloaded world, keeping up to date with laws you can't ignore but have no way to know about, planning logistics that our modern life impose on us...

Suddenly, like the CEO of today, every one will be able to have a secretary.

Yes, that can make a huge different.

Don't think about AI as the thing we have today. GPT the nokia 3310 of AI. Amazing, but very basic.

Think that one day, somebody will come out with the iphone of AI.

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You're just extending the lines in a way you like to imagine. Kinda like wishing for flying cars when we can't even make them navigate 2D city streets autonomously.

Exactly! Nobody should imagine and articulate any possibilities unless they are sure they will be correct. It's so embarrassing.

You just did the same thing with what I said to draw a ridiculous conclusion and attack that...

Isn't flight autopilot an easier problem than ground vehicle autopilot?

In airliners that cruise for hours at 3 times the height of the highest mountains...

Yes

Flight autopilot is easy if you only have to fly from one point to another. The hard part is dealing with emergencies. We are far from being able to build an autopilot that could react as well as the human crew did during US Airways flight 1549.

I don't have to imagine anything since I'm already delegating part of the job I used to send to my own secretary to AI, such as:

- reading boring documents and giving me the gist of it

- classifying my emails

- checking for typos and problems in my writing

- writing the boiler plate of documents

- translating doc

- doing basic search on a topic, such as legal obligations that haven't change in the last 2 years

It's cheaper than my secretary, faster, and has roughly the same error rate for those tasks. I have to double check her work anyway.

With plugins, people are already making stuff like booking a plane, another thing my secretary does.

It will expend.

So you're comfortable giving a black box secretary powers, including accessing and using remote APIs on your behalf, while you have zero insight or control over its decisions? Or will you be second guessing it every step of the way rendering it little more then a fancy autocomplete?

I don't think you realize the amount of risk involved in giving these opaque probabilistic systems control over data and compute. They are not people replacements and assuming so and acting on it will create more problems than it solves... Because extending thee lines to wrap around your needs is wishful thinking and there is a lot more complexity and hidden unintended consequences than assumed when saying chatbots capable of using APIs will be dependable personal assistants, which is the point I'm trying to make.

|Amazing, but very basic.

After playing around with ChatGPT for a few hours I have a hard time seeing how someone could objectively call it "basic".

The nokia 3310 was amazing.

But compared to what we have today, it's very basic.

Same for chatgpt.

Right but by that definition every thing in the universe is and will always be basic. The word becomes meaningless.

The temporality of evolution is what's important here.

The washing machine has reached a tipping point, we hit diminishing returns from now on.

The AI is in the nokia phase. It's at the primitive stage of development.

It is hard for people to comprehend the rate of change. Over the short term, it feels like we are on a gentle slope upward with respect to change. But the reality is the slope is near vertical. Even your analogy is a huge understatement. It will be more like Nokia today, and iPhone next week.

Washing machine but for office work is a great analogy.

You lost me at iPhone for AI. I think I know what you mean but it can be expressed better.

OP is saying GPT is the equivalent of an old Nokia feature phone. However cellphones really blew up once Apple figured out how to make smartphones broadly appealing with multi touch (prior to that you had things like Windows CE, Blackberry and Palm, but those were extremely more limited than what the iPhone delivered).

In other words the jump ahead from GPT to broadly useful AI is akin to the jump from the old Nokia feature phone to iPhone. Don’t let the current limitations of GPT color what you think AI will be generally capable of within the next decade.

> Suddenly, like the CEO of today, every one will be able to have a secretary.

I think something that was majorly lost in the past 60 years is the secretary. I agree with you that it’d be great if everyone had one - the working relationship between a secretary and the person they support can be amazingly productive.

>The washing machine is one of the biggest game changer in the world

The biggest game changer was the fossil fuel that enabled that washing machine, and all the other modern devices we rely on.

That same substance is used to as chemical feedstock for fertilizers and more than double yields, and more than double the amount of "arable" land. If we were to run out, half of humanity would likely starve.

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