Does the CEO and co-founder of Bond actually expect folks who read this announcement, as it shifts from Facebook's ambient data collection toward promoting Bond, to give Bond access to their valuable "identity capital" and sign up because they promise to give us more control over how we share our memories with AI and "provide a safe medium" via closed source? Absolutely not. Keep your superpowers offline with a local model.
“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.
Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!
I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!”
But will you?”
Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.
An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.
Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.
You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."
What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?
It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on
You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.
What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?
Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?
A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.
Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?
For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.
My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.
Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.
Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.
The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...
Does the CEO and co-founder of Bond actually expect folks who read this announcement, as it shifts from Facebook's ambient data collection toward promoting Bond, to give Bond access to their valuable "identity capital" and sign up because they promise to give us more control over how we share our memories with AI and "provide a safe medium" via closed source? Absolutely not. Keep your superpowers offline with a local model.
I wrote this in 2018:
AI and privacy are incompatible
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/artificial-intelligence-an...
Highlight towards the end
“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.
Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!
I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!” But will you?”
You guys have it backwards.
Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.
An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.
Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.
You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."
What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?
Thanks to people pioneering this I can spend a lot more time on the things I want.
" It plans his daughter’s recipes and orders the ingredients."
Believe or not people pay for others to do this for themselves.
i have and continue to build a ton of automations against my life. my goal is to offload more and more of my "life" to it.
- bills? bookkeeping? reading DMARC emails? yeah, i want to do none of it, but i desperately want these chores done.
- spend time with kids? study interesting topics? eat and drink interesting things? i want more of this.
life is what happens during all the waiting for life to happen.
That's a nice thought terminating cliché.
We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.
People said this about every new convenience, such as email over physical mail, buying things online instead of in stores, etc. It's a tired argument.
It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on
but why is it a tired argument?
You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.
Freedom to decide? Not that humanity is historically great at deciding what brings itself happiness.
Humanity or humans? Individual humans could, but as a collective we make stupid choices.
Humans are quite bad at doing what brings them (durable) happiness
What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?
Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?
A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.
What a miserable mindset.
Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?
For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.
My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.
Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.
Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.
The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...
Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.
After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.
Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?
> Zuckerberg promises an agent that understands you, your goals, everything you care about.
I.e. the most dangerous program you can imagine.
<s> I'm glad they are completely not creepy for a company that plans to make money by selling your private data. </s>
"Capture the daily moments that define you. Voice the hidden details and tell the story only you can tell."
"We may sell, transfer or otherwise share [..] including personal information"