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?
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.
this is a weak argument.. i use normal taxis and ask the driver to take me to a place in natural language - a process which is certainly non deterministic.
and the taxi driver has an intelligence that enables them to interpret your destination, even if ambiguous. And even then, mistakes happen (all the time with taxis going to a different place than the passenger intended because the names may have been similar).
The specific events that follow when asking a taxi driver where to go may not be exactly repeatable, but reality enforces physical determinism that is not explicitly understood by probabilistic token predictors. If you drive into a wall you will obey deterministic laws of momentum. If you drive off a cliff you will obey deterministic laws of gravity. These are certainties, not high probabilities. A physical taxi cannot have a catastrophic instant change in implementation and have its wheels or engine disappear when it stops to pick you up. A human taxi driver cannot instantly swap their physical taxi for a submarine, they cannot swap new york with paris, they cannot pass through buildings… the real world has a physically determined option-space that symbolic token predictors don’t understand yet.
And the reason humans are good at interpreting human intent correctly is not just that we’ve had billions of years of training with direct access to physical reality, but because we all share the same basic structure of inbuilt assumptions and “training history”. When interacting with a machine, so many of those basic unstated shared assumptions are absent, which is why it takes more effort to explicitly articulate what it is exactly that you want.
We’re getting much better at getting machines to infer intent from plain english, but even if we created a machine which could perfectly interpret our intentions, that still doesn’t solve the issue of needing to explain what you want in enough detail to actually get it for most tasks. Moving from point A to point B is a pretty simple task to describe. Many tasks aren’t like that, and the complexity comes as much from explaining what it is you want as it does from the implementation.
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.
> and my absolute favorite making a call which would dial the number and then about a second later immediately hang up.
Is it your phone hanging up or are you calling an iPhone in do not disturb mode, in which case you have to call twice for it to go through (because their phone is automatically hanging up on you)
So it was pretty bizarre. Basically as soon as I punched the "Dial" button it would show the "modal dialog" of the number being dialed and then immediately hang itself up.
It happened pretty inconsistently, but I managed to make it happen against another person - who also had a Pixel phone so I don't think it was related to the "Do Not Disturb" mode. I'd assume DND would at least put you through to voicemail though.
Honestly I love the priority notifications and the notification summaries. The thing that drives me absolutely insane, is that the fact that when I view the notification through clicking on it from another space other than the "While in the reduce interruptions focus" it doesn't clear. Because of this, I always have infinite notifications.
I want to open WhatsApp and open the message and have it clear the notif. Or atleast click the notif from the normal notif center and have it clear there. It kills me
A simple comment, but wow I really like the look of Bonsai! The lighting, shading and shapes are really beautiful, I think a game made in this would feel really unique
I don't think it needs to translate to "go on vacation". During my time being employed, this translated into getting up and stretching, taking a few minutes to look out the window, going for a short walk, taking an intentional breath, sitting and meditating for 15 minutes, actually eating lunch away from my computer, or not eating lunch and going for a quick run or doing yoga or going to the gym.
This can come forth in so many ways.
Moment by moment we can have an eye on our body and what it is asking for, I've found it to not only make me more productive, but also led to my baseline of stress to being way, way lower then everyone around me which is contagious in a positive way.
I think there is also a reality in which our scope of what we care about is widened beyond just the human species. As a species that has such a powerful impact on other beings, it would be nice to try and reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and pain that we place on them. While we cannot eliminate it, life takes life yadayada, we can reduce it and try to curb the mass extinction that we are actively causing.
From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.
As another mentioned, many of us haven't been trained. Every time I've reached for Siri I've been let down and just did it myself or didn't do it at all.
When I bought the new iphone (coming from Android most recently and iphone before that) I figured that Siri would actually become good because of this translation layer, and then them just not doing that has been a huge let down for me on the phone.
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 ;)