[windowlessmonad]

Are our attention spans so shot that we consider booking a reservation at a restaurant or buying groceries "hugely boring"? And do we value convenience so much that we're willing to sacrifice a huge breadth of options for whatever sponsor du jour OpenAI wants to serve us just to save less than 10 minutes?

And would this company spend billions of dollars for this infinitesimally small increase in convenience? No, of course not; you are not the real customer here. Consider reading between the lines and thinking about what you are sacrificing just for the sake of minor convenience.

[dougb5]

I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's famous story about buying postage stamps: https://www.insidehook.com/wellness/kurt-vonnegut-advice

"I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different...How beautiful it is to get up and go do something."

[0_____0]

I love so much. It really encapsulates what I've been feeling about tech and life generally. Society and especially tech seems so efficiency minded that I feel like a crazy person for going to do my groceries at the store sometimes.

[sumedh]

> Are our attention spans so shot that we consider booking a reservation at a restaurant or buying groceries "hugely boring"?

Dont be limited with these examples.

How about Airline booking, try different airlines, go to the confirmation screen. then the user can check if everything is allright and if the user wants to finish the booking on the most cheapest one.

[lm28469]

Google flight does that for you, and your browser can already full in 80% of the form fields. I don't remember spending more than 1 minute booking tickets. Deciding where to go takes 50-100x more time, the booking speed is such a non issue.

What's the goal of technology ? Automate everything so that we don't have to live anymore ? We might as well build matrix pods at that point

[lolinder]

Exactly. 90% of the time I spend booking tickets is in reading every single field a few extra times before clicking "yes, please charge my card $N00". I'm not about to outsource that confirmation step to an LLM, and outsourcing anything else isn't going to save any real time.

[windowlessmonad]

Airline booking is a solved problem. Google, Expedia, and many others have their hands on flight pricing and can show you comparisons of those in a single query. Takes 2 minutes. What is the value add of AI here? Making the experience feel like a conversation and at a hyper inflated cost and resource usage with the risk of hallucination? No thanks, solved problem.

[sumedh]

It's not a solved problem though, the final cost on the website can be different based on what options you select

[snakeyjake]

The potential of x-Models (x=ll, transformer, tts, etc), which are not AI, to perfect the flooding of social media with bullshit to increase the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people is so great that there is a near-infinite stream of money available to be spent on useless shit like this.

Talking to an x-Model (still not AI), just like talking to a human, has never been, is not now, and will never be faster than looking at an information-dense table of data.

x-Models (will never be AI) will eat the world though, long after the dream of talking to a computer to reserve a table has died, because they are so good at flooding social media with bullshit to facilitate the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people.

That being said, it is highly likely that is an extremely large group of people who are so braindead that they need a robot to click through TripAdvisor links for them to create a boring, sterile, assembly-line one-day tour of Rome.

Whether or not those people have enough money to be extracted from them to make running such a service profitable remains to be seen.

[rohit89]

These are chores and you are vastly underestimating the time saved. The 5-10 min saved per task, they all stack up. Also eventually these would be open source models that you can host yourself so you wouldn't need to worry about giving control to any corporation.

[openrisk]

The fact that you are downvoted despite pointing the obvious tells you about the odds of the tech industry adopting a different path. Fleecing the ignoramy is the name of the game.

[dutchbookmaker]

I am almost 50 and I have never booked a reservation for a restaurant in my entire life.

The Rome trip is even more absurd. Part of the fun of a trip is figuring out what you want to do.

This seems like a product aimed at the delusional, self important, managerial class.

[sumedh]

> I am almost 50 and I have never booked a reservation for a restaurant in my entire life.

Ok but that does not mean others share the same opinion. Try doing a walk in for a fancy restaurant on the weekend, see how that goes?