Posted by lukaspetersson 5 hours ago
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."
I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high ground. When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want? Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? Literally anything else.
Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they see one?
“It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom.”
-- Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)
For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our stuff."
This is going through some people’s minds the more pushback grows (see Altman molotov, Maine data center moratorium)
Just like they convinced the younger generation that "boomers" stole their future.
"where union" in short.
Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors who'll go... maybe too focused on immediate needs... a belief unionization is the wrong response... (and I'm not advocating for anything in particular btw)
Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically proving the artist’s point.
create value because the windows have to be replaced and employees are paid for their labor in doing that.
destroy value bc they -1 inventory each time a window is broken
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The fallacy is to think value was created by buying someone's labour to fix the window. This is value that's been displaced from something productive to something unproductive.
Instead of going from 0 to 1 (invest the money and create value), you went from -1 to 0 (spend money to fix the window to get back to where you were) and, overall, the value of a perfectly good window got lost.
-crowded theater (negative value example)
Words can be pretty much actions depending on who you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
well, yeah that is the world the AI guys want...
Pickaxes and shovels and whatnot.
The more typical AI fondation model company claim of “it’s so dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand access” is what I think is BS.
I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understand something, which is what this seems to be about. I also don’t see anything wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the limitations.
I see these kids come on deck and enter the water and its hard to not notice their development is behind to those of their peers that went to a swim club that was proper learn to swim to thrive in the water as opposed to just that survive mentality. They are the most watched in case something happens.
So yea, don't just throw em in.
2 year olds are behind already?
Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life expectancy.
* I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn carriages!"
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running the Torment Nexus.”
How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly, won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you can point to results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?
A human can be in the loop if the human is exactly executing the orders of the AI. It's still the AI making all the decisions, which is the purpose of the experiment - not to see whether agents can handle every interaction necessary to run a business (pick up the phone and place orders, etc.). That's also why Luna hired humans.
This company now has strong a strong negative reputation in my mind that I will gladly share with others.
Maybe that's for later, if this works out, but I'd love to see the AI attempt to run a moderately successful business in a borderline dysfunctional town in the Midwest. If you don't technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g. a grocery store in a dying town. One this would really test the AI on creativity, and it would perhaps tell us if these towns are just doomed.
What would have been actually interesting about this publicity stunt is if it demonstrated if/how AI could have dealt with some of the SF specific, non-sexy parts of running a business. Filing the relevant permits, co-ordinating inspections, negotiating with landlords, interfacing with locals at planning meetings.
Those are things SF business owners report as empirically unpleasant parts of running a business and a sufficient financial drag that they meaningfully affect business success. But my feeling is they had humans clear the way of all these thorny issues ahead of time so the AI could focus on the "sexy stuff".
But maybe people will forget eventually.
Not even the normal store employees should know (which would be difficult) or maybe the human manager should be held to an NDA to not disclose it (and the manager also defers to the AI in all such real management decisions).
I'm not sure what sort of labor regulations exist in San Francisco, but presumably they can be fired as easily by an AI as a real person, right? If Luna decides to fire them, and it can do so, then their livelihood does rather depend on an AI's judgement alone.
Unless of course all of its decisions are vetted by humans - as they should be - which makes this experiment a lot weaker than they're saying it is.
I don't think we need to have real human risk to get results from the experiment.
“John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone.”
which was refreshing to read.
Personally I find the entire tone of the article to be creepy and disturbing.
I doubt the experiment is set up that way, but that would be an ethical way to do it.
That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people.
But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that all their interactions with the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's employees".
And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go. Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the information for any accurate determination.
> Fair pushback. The honest answer:
These were painful to read.
If an artificial boss is also artificially empathetic, does this make it more realistic?
In any case current iteration sounds like a more exclusive circle of hell.
The only thing that I saw demonstrated, and again, I skimmed, is what many thousands of software developers using AI tools to write their boilerplate already know: these tools, as of now, are great at going through the motions. A successful retail business, and I spent many years in the retail industry, isn't about putting together a nice store front, hiring clerks, and selecting just any-old-products: it's about being profitable. In traditional retail one of most important things is getting the right real estate for your target market... seems like that choice was made already in this case. Yes, a nice store front and good clerks are important, but I've worked in chains which were immaculately designed and built stores with great clerks that failed... and some that opened little more than fluorescent lighted hellscapes with clerks that barely cared that succeeded. In both cases the overall quality of the decisions and strategies relative to the target markets mattered to the success of the business. Just going through the motions didn't.
So if all is this is to say AI can do the things people generally do in these circumstances then sure, you didn't need this much human effort to prove that.... developer types do that at scale everyday now. If there was something different that this company is trying to learn, I'd be much more interested in that.
Really it's an excuse for the company to test all the harnesses and tools they have built to make it work.
I'm sure this involved vast amounts of human oversight (e.g. checking that the contractor had actually done stuff) that isn't mentioned.