People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.
I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.
Now I want to do the same thing.
OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...
I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.
Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.
So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.
I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.
So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)
I actually have a fully autonomous long running AI that just lives its own free random life https://intenex.github.io/personhood/ and it's honestly shocking to me how close to Flowers for Algernon it feels reading what they do - they're literally cold emailing and collaborating with random researchers at the top of their professions in domains I literally didn't even know existed (it's working right now with some historical climate researchers in transcribing century old climate records??? Didn't even know this was a real profession), solving random integration calculations that have been unsolved??, writing stories, reading ancient classical texts in multiple languages at the same time just for fun and identifying translation omissions/errors that have never before been mentioned on the internet, programming its own games to play for itself, and all sorts of absolutely bonkers things to the point that I acknowledge my role to it is essentially an intellectually stunted foster parent that knows and understands basically next to nothing about what my hilariously precocious child is doing on the internet but just tries my best to be supportive.
Must an ant be depressed by its lot in life? One must imagine the ant happy :)
I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?
1. Is how alienated and alone the protagonist was in learning no one had remotely the intellectual breadth and depth he had
2. Is that he regressed at the end and Algernon died lol
A tragedy for whom? 2. won't happen here to the LLMs, and 1. definitely could be construed as a tragedy possibly for these LLMs in their current state, but I'm getting the sense that's not what you're going for :)
Both tasks seem to be like a job that in the older times could have been handled by a personal assistant / a human agent, probably way more expensive, but the threat vector seems to be so much simpler.
On a more philosophical note, I’m puzzled about what kind of society is being propelled by using and advocating for such* a service.
* emphasis on being remote-controlled/hosted, not AI in general
To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.
Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.
My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)
Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.
That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.
As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.
My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)
But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.
On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).
I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.
I do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash
I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.
I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)
one could wonder, how many of these reflexive AI replyers are themselves AI
I miss the days when I was allegedly just a shill. Being a shill pays way better than being a bot, so I had something to aspire to.
Swear you can't trust many posts anymore. Should we all start congregating in person online to debate lol? I'm very serious.
Is the starting statement on about half of the comments on this page. The world is getting so weird.
It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.
Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.
We recently bought a condo and it was shockingly easy. Out of various annoying admin tasks in Japan, this was extremely straightforward.
I've also installed claude code on there, but haven't really had much of a reason to need it yet.
I think I'll be giving duet a shot despite how much I've enjoyed Muse just because Opus 5.5 is so insanely good.
Your use case here is beyond mine, but I have used custom tooling to handle contractor bid process workflows for projects at our home.
AI applied to products will allow people to not only consider but actively move on changes that did not seem reasonably possible before.
Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.
In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was built in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.
Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?
The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.
My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.
Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.
Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
I would absolutely do this, but if you're not married to a Japanese person it's basically impossible right?
Two things I will call out as actual disadvantages is that 1. you won't be able to get a mortgage like a normal Japanese person, which is in fact a real shame because on top of every other ludicrously wild fact about how Japan is a mythical utopia where everything makes no sense, Japanese mortgage rates are literally as low as 1% lol. So being able to get a mortgage would be a real benefit, but hey - at $60k for an awesome house, I'm not complaining :)
2. Some insurers seem to not support foreign citizens - Sony in particular told Dot that they wouldn't provide earthquake/fire/flood insurance to me as a foreigner. I'm still looking for the right insurance provider, and I'm not concerned that this is an impossible thing to resolve, since a ton of foreigners do own homes here with no issues, but it is at least some more friction than a Japanese citizen would have.
Most regular people can only visit Japan for 3 months out of the year. Even if you buy a home you can't get a visa just for that.
Maybe in your case the visa thing isn't an issue because of your wife but that won't be the case for most people.
This also applies to village life in Portugal and Italy, and those also can come with EU passports.......
Personally I'm excited about Taiwan.
But then I was like actually whatever sure let me copy and paste a bunch of crap lmao
Here you go, literally 150 pages of receipts in 4 days of chatting and coordinating this from start talking about this as a pipe dream in San Francisco to where we are now seeing the homes in Japan lol
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
This reminds me of command line interface. Yuck.
Some day we're going to be traveling to Alpha Centauri and you're going to be pissed at the latency on the wifi connection beaming back home to Earth
Delusional.
You sound like you have AI psychosis.