[999900000999]

How far are we away from something like a helmet with chat GPT and a video camera installed, I imagine this will be awesome for low vision people. Imagine having a guide tell you how to walk to the grocery store, and help you grocery shop without an assistant. Of course you have tons of liability issues here, but this is very impressive

[JieJie]

We're planning on getting a phone-carrying lanyard and she will just carry her phone around her neck with Be My Eyes^0 looking out the rear camera, pointed outward. She's DeafBlind, so it'll be bluetoothed to her hearing aids, and she can interact with the world through the conversational AI.

I helped her access the video from the presentation, and it brought her to tears. Now, she can play guitar, and the AI and her can write songs and sing them together.

This is a big day in the lives of a lot of people whom aren't normally part of the conversation. As of today, they are.

0: https://www.bemyeyes.com/

[999900000999]

That's definitely cool!

Eventually it would be better for these models to run locally from a security point if view, but this is a great first step.

[JieJie]

Absolutely. We're looking forward to Apple's announcements at WWDC this year, which analysts predict are right up that alley.

[silverquiet]

It sounds like the system that Marshall Brain envisioned in his novella, Manna.

[jaggederest]

That story has always been completely reasonable and plausible to me. Incredible foresight. I guess I should start a midlevel management voice automation company.

[pdfernhout]

Definitely heading there: https://marshallbrain.com/manna "With half of the jobs eliminated by robots, what happens to all the people who are out of work? The book Manna explores the possibilities and shows two contrasting outcomes, one filled with great hope and the other filled with misery."

And here are some ideas I put together around 2010 on how to deal with the socio-economic fallout from AI and other advanced technology: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

And a related YouTube video: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA "A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."

My sig is about the deeper issue here though: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

[milchek]

Your last quote also reminds me this may be true for everything else, especially our diets.

Technology has leapfrogged nature and our consumption patterns have not caught up to modern abundance. Scott Galloway recently mentioned this in his OMR speech and speculated that GLP1 drugs (which actually help addiction) will assist in bringing our biological impulses more inline with current reality.

[pdfernhout]

Indeed, they are related. A 2006 book on eating healthier called "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle and Alan Goldhamer helped me see that connection (so, actually going the other way at first). And a later book from 2010 called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett also expanded that idea beyond food to media and gaming and more. The 2010 essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham also explores those themes. In the 2007 book The Assault on Reason by Al Gore talks about watching television and the orienting response to sudden motion like scene changes.

In short, humans are adapted for a world with a scarcity of salt, refined carbs like sugar, fat, information, sudden motion, and more. But the world most humans live in now has an abundance of those things -- and our previously-adaptive evolved inclinations to stock up on salt/sugar/fat (especially when stressed) or to pay attention to the unusual (a cause of stress) are now working against our physical and mental health in this new environment. Thanks for the reference to a potential anti-addiction substance. Definitely something that deserves more research.

My sig -- informed by the writings of people like Mumford, Einstein, Fuller, Hogan, Le Guinn, Banks, Adams, Pet, and many others -- is making the leap to how that evolutionary-mismatch theme applies to our use of all sorts of technology.

Here is a deeper exploration of that in relation to militarism (and also commercial competition to some extent): https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

Conversely, reflecting on this more just now, are we are perhaps evolutionarily adapted to take for granted some things like social connections, being in natural green spaces, getting sunlight, getting enough sleep, or getting physical exercise? These are all things that are in increasingly short supply in the modern world for many people -- but which there may never have been much evolutionary pressure previously to seek out, since they were previously always available.

For example, in the past humans were pretty much always in face-to-face interactions with others of their tribe, so there was no big need to seek that out especially if it meant ignoring the next then-rare new shiny thing. Johann Hari and others write about this loss of regular human face-to-face connection as a major cause of depression.

Stephen Ilardi expands on that in his work, which brings together many of these themes and tries to help people address them to move to better health.

From: https://tlc.ku.edu/ "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

GPT-4o, by apparently providing "her" movie-like engaging interactions with an AI avatar that seeks to please the user (while possibly exploiting them) is yet another example of our evolutionary tendencies potentially being used to our detriment. And when our social lives are filled-to-overflowing with "junk" social relationships with AIs, will most people have the inclinations to seek out other real humans if it involves doing perhaps increasingly-uncomfortable-from-disuse actions (like leaving the home or putting down the smartphone)? Not quite the same, but consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

Related points by others:

"AI and Trust" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.... "In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI."

"The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI - Maggie Appleton" https://youtu.be/VXkDaDDJjoA?t=2098 (in the section on the lack of human relationship potential when interacting with generated content)

[glatapoui]

I'm more into audiobook, and can't find an audio version for this one. Maybe GPT-4o could read it to me?

[rfoo]

Can't wait for the moment when I can puta single line "Help me put this in the cart" on my product and magically sells better.

[smokel]

This Dutch book [1] by Gummbah has the text "Kooptip" imprinted on the cover, which would roughly translate to "Buying recommendation". It worked for me!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Het-geheim-verdwenen-mysterie-Dutch/d...

[DonHopkins]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book

[seanmcdirmid]

Or tell the AI to optimize paper clip production as much as possible.

[krainboltgreene]

> Imagine having a guide tell you how to walk to the grocery store

I don't need to imagine that, I've had it for about 8 years. It's OK.

> help you grocery shop without an assistant

Isn't this something you learn as a child? Is that a thing we need automated?

[jameshart]

OP specified they were imaging this for low vision people

[krainboltgreene]

I'm aware, I'm one of those people.

[bombcar]

Does it give you voice instructions based on what it knows or is it actively watching the environment and telling you things like "light is red, car is coming"?

[jaggederest]

I assume it likes snacks, is quadrupedal, and does not have the proper mouth anatomy or diaphragm for human speech.

[macintux]

Just the ability to distinguish bills would be hugely helpful, although I suppose that's much less of a problem these days with credit cards and digital payment options.

[ninininino]

just need the helmet https://openai.com/index/be-my-eyes/

[sim7c00]

city guide tours, not a bad take tbh :D rather than walkin behind the guy with a megaphone and a flag.