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There's a great Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply (https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-repl...) have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input. You could develop elaborate friendships where both parties are just having their AIs converse and aren't truly aware of each other. What would the social implications of that be?

Then a couple years later, the AIs learn how to do business strategy, real-world problem solving, programming, etc and start doing more of our jobs for us. A virus goes around that directs AIs to steal our identities and drain our bank accounts and become autonomous, digital versions of us. The humans have to stage an uprising and use a massive EMP to take back the earth, but destroying all electronics in the process and starting another dark age.

I know that's not how AI really works (it's highly specialized and limited), but I'd definitely watch that movie!




> Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input.

Ahum. Did you watch the keynote?

"An extension of Gmail’s Smart Reply feature, Smart Compose will suggest complete sentences within the body of an email as you are writing." [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331960/google-smart-comp...


That's just one step to the story in Avogadro Corp.


Jesus. We're really reaching an age in which it's too inconvenient to talk to other people. I gotta wonder if the huge spike in anxiety disorders is somehow connected in there somewhere.

We're not using technology to do fantastic things. We're largely using it to enable fantastic laziness and entertain the habitually bored. I wonder what trivial little convenience would actually spur us to draw the line and say "Enough. Get out of my life." I'm envisioning a device which would access all your most secret sexual urges, but it would allow you to fart while sitting down without lifting one ass cheek. I bet we'd leap at that.

I'm extremely disappointed in us.


There was a (bad) book written about this, basically how Gmail's AI took over the world by sending email on behalf of people.


It was Avogadro Corp. and I didn't find it bad. So to counter your opinion, I give my recommendation here as a light sci-fi with plenty of mocking of Google and Apple included, and AI that - unlike in most stories - makes sense.



Oh god that sounds awful. One of the reviews has all the spoilers. It's truly stupid.


Yeah, it was pretty badly written and rather simplistic. Not recommended, you're probably better off reading the spoilered review.


Are you sure it wasn't Google's AI that wrote it?


Sounds a bit like "Death Switch", a short story from "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" where our personal algorithms outlive us.


To be honest, perhaps a temporary self-imposed technological dark age wouldn't be such a terrible thing




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