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Comment by exegete | Hacker News Reader

It’s an interesting thought but I think there are better ways to do this than having some external disk. You could download all of WikiPedia, medical articles, etc to a laptop to the same effect. A survivalist book is probably even better since it won’t rely on power.

The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.

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An AI chatbot trained on massive amounts of knowledge about survival, farming, animal husbandry, small scale community management, home building, clothes making, etc would be immensely valuable.

“I have chickens and one has stopped laying eggs and become lethargic. What could be the cause?”

These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search, and being “jpegs for knowledge” you can pack a lot of knowledge into a small device. You have to check the results but having some old fashioned books on hand would help with that, as would some common sense.

I agree about a separate device. A durable laptop and a solar panel to charge it would be best.

A lot of special purpose devices are sold as a way to sell software since people won’t buy software. Sell a software and data bundle containing curated data and apps and such and nobody will buy it, but pair it with some e-waste and they will.

Same goes for a lot of digital assistants and other gadgets. They could just be apps but people don’t buy apps so they have to come bundled with e-waste.

> These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search

Here's an article that argues otherwise, convincingly IMO:

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-...

> The product offering of an AI chatbot for when the power goes out made me laugh out loud.

To be fair, the current iteration of this is of course bullshit but imagine this in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices can easily host AIs that outperform or at least match current best models and has been specifically trained to be an emergency assistant.

Kinda reminds me of the public access defibrillators that talk you through an emergency [0]. I can see an AI Assistant be useful during emergencies.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zApKRGDs1sk

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"

I wonder if such a device could be a good counterpoint to cloud services in a business environment. Just as a reaction to the difficulty and cost of compliance when data is online.

> in 10 years when raspberry pi sized devices

Like a phone

Stuff like this makes me think about the benefits which developing countries currently have. They have access to such a vast amount of information, like Wikipedia, any book on AA or torrents, YouTube tutorials, free AI chatbots and what not. Yet the social problems like the ones caused through corruption, localized conflicts and wars are so big, that none of this information is of any value. Who's to blame?

But don't a lot of developing countries have similar access? And especially torrenting is much more common in less developed countries where there's no copyright enforcement.

> “…benefits which developing countries currently have.”

The story of mobile phone use in African continent, where there are only the worst roads and no land lines, is an astonishing story of leaping forward through technology.

It is of value though. Asian farmers were able to use cell phones to check weather and market prices to be able to grow more and sell for a better price [1]. Mobile banking apps have allowed poor Kenyans access to formal financial services, improving financial stability for those most vulnerable [2]. Being able to send money to disparate family members safely and securely protects them from corrupt local informal networks. Access to modern technology developed in first world countries enable poor counties to skip over expensive intermediate steps, like going from no phones to cell towers without building out a land line network. The #saveourgirls social media campaign in response to the Boco Haram kidnappings was started locally, after frustration with lack of action by the inept/corrupt local government, and brought international pressure, support, and aid.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259029112...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/p...

I don’t know who it is in other countries. But here, as corruption and local conflicts rise, without a doubt, 100%, it’s going to be libertarians.

An ai chatbot might be a more accessible way to access information. Also, batteries and solar exist

Exactly what you want during a disaster - a chatbot confidently hallucinating nonsense answers to your questions when you can't verify them.

Hallucinated nonsense is easily prevented by restricting output to verbatim content from a pre-vetted knowledge base. Think fuzzy search for people who prefer to ask questions instead of listing keywords.

I doubt this is what they've done here, but not all AI chatbots have to be thin wrappers around a large language model.

I wouldn’t be that hysterical Dan. It could be used to point the user in a direction that is helpful, in the same way as they are used now. Its well known that chatbots hallucinate, yet many people use them, by choice, because they find them helpful.

It's not hysterical to point out a problem.

It is - in my opinion - hysterical, to point out a single problem as if its the end of the world

> end of the world

And I'm the hysterical one?

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