Especially with current-day chat-style interfaces with RLHF, which consciously are designed to direct people towards anthropomorphization.
It would be interesting to design a non-chat LLM interaction pattern that's designed to be anti-anthropomorphization.
> humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them
I also blame a lot (but not all) of that on current AI UX, and I wonder if there are ways around it. Maybe the blind trust thing perhaps can be mitigated by never giving an unambiguous output (always options, at least). I don't have any ideas about the problem of deferring responsibility.
"Deep research" is another interaction style that produces more official sounding texts, yet still leads to anthropomorphization.
What you are looking for is perhaps an LLM flaunting all the obvious slop patterns in its responses. But then people would be disgusted and would refuse to communicate with it.
> So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product.
Which, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever. The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command.
If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business book and either didn't understand the book, don't understand their own business, or is following some guru who has one of those problems.
Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed.
Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing:
Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there.
The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument to another function.
Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well.
This is also why its actually not so surprising that LLM's are mastering programming skills, it's essentially just being a plumber, and a lot of people are happy they no longer need to be a plumber. Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.
An assembly line is plumbing too. And just like software, while there are a finite number of variants at any specific time, the plumbing is constantly being rearranged for various reasons. A line won't look the same in 6 months as it does today.
Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.
I've sat next to the industrial engineers designing the lines and MechEs working in CAD. My software job wasn't all that different at a high level. We all wrote requirements, made bugfixes, and complained about the tier 1s. They usually spent more time visiting the lines in Asia/Mexico/Michigan/Canada. I just emailed the factory when I needed to fix something.
> Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well.
No, wrong again. Some software development tasks are like plumbing, but that misses a lot. Your claim in sort of like saying since the Wendelstein_7-X has wiring, the manager an electrical contractor would be good to lead that project.
Plumbers and electricians more or less solve the same problems over and over with slightly different parameters, and because of the repetitiveness, they can do a good job by following (a hefty number) of rules of thumb (the building code). A software developer isn't going to go far just throwing design patterns at a problem (though many bad ones try).
The plumber who has a robot who can make perfectly measured custom one-off tools and specially constructed piping runs inside your walls is going to have super powers compared to somebody who has to go to home depot and assemble a bunch of PVC pipes or whatever.
Just the other day I needed to make a calibration interface for a home automation app (pointing a dumb webcam at my washer and dryer so I can tell if they're done without running up and down two flights or stairs). I just wanted to be able to look at the whole scene and manually pick the ROI to extract and display on my home dashboard. So I asked the AI to build me a stupid little web UI where I can just click to select the ROI center, and what it built me in 10 seconds was perfect for my needs.
Was it pretty? Not really. Was it what I would have built myself? Not quite - but it solved the problem I had without me needing to remember or look up how to do all the specifics.
Have you considered taping a sensor to the light, or measuring the electrical current flowing through the power cord? Both should be a bit more reliable. The idea of messing with mains power is scary at first but with basic precautions it's fine, and I think you can buy current meters with various interfaces if you aren't comfortable.
Why would I buy power meters and mess around with indirect signals that don't measure what I want (how much time is left on the cycle) and instead just tell me whether it's running?
I already have an old webcam and raspi I'm not using, and they measure exactly what I care about.
> Similar if I could recall all of my organisations confluence pages. Id probably be a lot better at my job. Same with all the slack history. All the hr documents, press releases, meeting transcripts. Theres practically no end to useful context even just in text form, and even if much of it is not relevant to any one task, having all of it in working memory would be fantastic, if only it were possible. I could probably make incredible cross organisational efficiencies and probably be far wealthier if I were some savant that could hold all of this in my head at once.
That sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi story where the conclusion is forgetting is not such a bad thing.
> More likely, the story is designed to make the public believe that US propaganda is actually aimed at the "foreign adversary" rather than at the US population.
Or some kind of cover story to distract from the real technology. If they really used some kind of advanced beacon, but they can convince people it's actually some kind of crazy-advanced heartbeat-detector, they can discourage their adversaries from looking for the beacon signal.
> discourage their adversaries from looking for the beacon signal
I thought the exact same thing the moment I saw it. LPI (low probability of intercept) beacon just makes so much more sense (in the kit the pilot ejects with... has existed for decades). Why would they bother detecting heartbeats? They might not even detect the right one or trigger on an animal or whatever.
China will win because its leaders didn't drink the capitalist kool-aid, which mean they can use capitalism as a tool instead of being controlled by its dysfunction.
>> Once you get the hang of it you can make peoples days genuinely better effortlessly, by just saying the positive thing that you're thinking.
>> "How are you today" → "Better, now you're here" -- Isn't cheesy, if you mean it.
> To me that's super creepy. It's like a cheap pickup line. It's only something I'd say to someone I'd been dating a while.
Really, if the person actually means it? I think that's the key point.
I think that particular line would come off as creepy pickup line if it came from a stranger, who couldn't possibly mean it except in the most superficial way. I don't think it would come off that way if your relationship with the person is such that it's plausibly true and they don't overuse it.
On that last point, if you actually want to do something like this, I feel like you'd have to have familiar and confidence to use hundreds of phrases like that, for different situations. I'm reminded of an anecdote I read about Ronald Reagan: he was apparently known as being good with little quips and jokes. He apparently spent a huge amount of time working on them so he'd have something ready at any given time.
Full disclosure: I'm bad at complements and do none of this stuff.
> But if you read a book about influencing people and suddenly start complimenting people’s hair, time for some introspection.
The book's also apparently about winning friends, as well. And the excerpt above seems to be about getting better at being nice to people without an agenda.
> In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.
Even if your statement is true, it's questionable. People also tend to prefer hearing what they want to hear to hearing what they need to hear, and rank the former interaction higher.
Basically, tech's favorite feedback mechanism, customer reviews, cannot actually be relied upon to tell you how good something is.
Correction: for the investors.
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