It's been a while since I've seen James - it's not the years, it's the mileage - but I really appreciated the first-hand outbrief from Paris. Good to know.
I do think that people are missing what agents will be good for when they talk about booking an airplane ticket. The AI agents will be useful when they can dynamically realign your calendar and your reservations for you, managing competing schedules and keeping the overall purpose of your travels in mind. Closer to an executive assistant, to whom you delegate your calendar and open your email account.
The question is: where else is this helpful? What other daily tasks in many peoples' lives are complex enough to require continuous attention and coordination?
One definitely is the general contractor/property manager - even for a single-family home. It's too much for someone with a full-time job to coordinate all the trades, even for maintenance tasks. This gets even more tricky, as the AI must prompt you to sometimes hold in person conversations (maybe using Translate, in part to capture the content) and to take photos for quality control, it also needs to coordinate pulling permits, scheduling, purchasing, materials and bills of lading, etc.
Another is the financial advisor/personal shopper. Quickbooks combined with goals like clothes, food, real estate, healthcare costs, education, etc.
Then there is medical/fitness/diet. Veterinary services (not so much for me, but for others). Car maintenance could use this kind of AI agent.
Many people bring up mental health, career coaching, education... but when you look at how few people have the initiative to bring another person into these relationships, self-improvement looks like a goal we have 'for other people' unless you are a high performer already. AI is best at filling a gap we would (and do) gladly (or somewhat grudgingly) pay a person to do already.
As a government employee, records management is a real problem. As a private person, AI agents are already busy helping keep my files organized in Google Photos, for example. It should be a near term goal for government (I see it coming) to sort through incoming emails and share drives to identify 'records' for management.
As a scientist, I'm working with 'cloud laboratory' services - Big Pharma is embracing them - and AI can help generate and execute protocols, analyze the data, dynamically apply stopping rules for experiments, do formal design of experiments, etc. This is part of that 'robotics' you describe, but very specialized.
I hope this helps explain some of the use cases I see and would be eager to embrace.
On the tutoring front, perhaps a key would be AI algorithms better than social media’s algorithms to help students build their curiosity instead of seeing it destroyed during their middle school years. Having taught at least a little bit at all levels and listened to hundreds of teachers, the loss of curiosity between elementary and high school seems to put the most students at the greatest disadvantages. That means using AI effectively to build intrinsic motivation that’s more powerful than what’s derived from the brain rot apps and counter-educational games. It also means AI figuring out when each kid needs to get off the screen and go play with real human friends, explore outside, and otherwise take steps that will restore healthy sleep patterns, better diet, lots of exercise, and better social connection. Speaking and listening with other humans needs to be emphasized more strongly than before given that reading and writing are about to be taught, and we hope, learned, in revolutionary new ways via AI.
The aiTutor needs both personalization, like The Illustrated Primer, and reporting to the parent/ teacher on what the child is doing with the tablet/ PC running the Tutor. A 95%+ (98%?) accurate voice directed agent, like a servant, is highly desirable. It’s possible that chain of thought reasoning, with step by step explanations, can help students learn to duplicate it. Maybe excellent for 80% of folks.
I don’t really want Google, nor OpenAI, nor X or any non-local agent to be able to do my banking without my final case by case approval. But prepping all the info, accounts, & amounts, would be good.
An app maker for little apps would be good. I now want one to take an original video hit song & create a music only with lyrics on screen karaoke version. Probably using other music & video adjusting apps that a good human could already do.
All digital work now done by humans will soon be able to be done by aiBots, at about the top 80% level.
I wrote an epic novel in 2022, partly as a means of seeing what AI can do. The novel was very long and intricate, to the point where it was difficult to wrap my head around it all and make it consistent. I figured the AI could "fact check" the novel for internal consistency. It was fascinating how desperately incompetent AI was at that job! I'd feed it the same chapter five or six times, and get five or six completely different accounts, all of them fascinating, and with almost all details completely made up. I feel like I got lasting insight from that strange exercise.
The novel is still in a half-baked state, unfortunately. Since the virtual AI editor I planned on using didn't turn out to be up to the job.
James Cham recommended an essay by Arnold Kling that captures the challenges entrepreneurs and early adopters face in navigating how to take advantage of significant new technologies and clusters of technologies. It's called "Series of Miscalculations" (Oct-12-1999) http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst218.html This is a condensed version of the adventures he recounted in "Under the Radar" https://www.amazon.com/Under-Radar-Starting-Business-Without/dp/0738207748
The essay is brief and well-written and offers a number of useful insights for today.
It's been a while since I've seen James - it's not the years, it's the mileage - but I really appreciated the first-hand outbrief from Paris. Good to know.
I do think that people are missing what agents will be good for when they talk about booking an airplane ticket. The AI agents will be useful when they can dynamically realign your calendar and your reservations for you, managing competing schedules and keeping the overall purpose of your travels in mind. Closer to an executive assistant, to whom you delegate your calendar and open your email account.
The question is: where else is this helpful? What other daily tasks in many peoples' lives are complex enough to require continuous attention and coordination?
One definitely is the general contractor/property manager - even for a single-family home. It's too much for someone with a full-time job to coordinate all the trades, even for maintenance tasks. This gets even more tricky, as the AI must prompt you to sometimes hold in person conversations (maybe using Translate, in part to capture the content) and to take photos for quality control, it also needs to coordinate pulling permits, scheduling, purchasing, materials and bills of lading, etc.
Another is the financial advisor/personal shopper. Quickbooks combined with goals like clothes, food, real estate, healthcare costs, education, etc.
Then there is medical/fitness/diet. Veterinary services (not so much for me, but for others). Car maintenance could use this kind of AI agent.
Many people bring up mental health, career coaching, education... but when you look at how few people have the initiative to bring another person into these relationships, self-improvement looks like a goal we have 'for other people' unless you are a high performer already. AI is best at filling a gap we would (and do) gladly (or somewhat grudgingly) pay a person to do already.
As a government employee, records management is a real problem. As a private person, AI agents are already busy helping keep my files organized in Google Photos, for example. It should be a near term goal for government (I see it coming) to sort through incoming emails and share drives to identify 'records' for management.
As a scientist, I'm working with 'cloud laboratory' services - Big Pharma is embracing them - and AI can help generate and execute protocols, analyze the data, dynamically apply stopping rules for experiments, do formal design of experiments, etc. This is part of that 'robotics' you describe, but very specialized.
I hope this helps explain some of the use cases I see and would be eager to embrace.
On the tutoring front, perhaps a key would be AI algorithms better than social media’s algorithms to help students build their curiosity instead of seeing it destroyed during their middle school years. Having taught at least a little bit at all levels and listened to hundreds of teachers, the loss of curiosity between elementary and high school seems to put the most students at the greatest disadvantages. That means using AI effectively to build intrinsic motivation that’s more powerful than what’s derived from the brain rot apps and counter-educational games. It also means AI figuring out when each kid needs to get off the screen and go play with real human friends, explore outside, and otherwise take steps that will restore healthy sleep patterns, better diet, lots of exercise, and better social connection. Speaking and listening with other humans needs to be emphasized more strongly than before given that reading and writing are about to be taught, and we hope, learned, in revolutionary new ways via AI.
Thanks for transcript! Arnold, James, & substack.
The aiTutor needs both personalization, like The Illustrated Primer, and reporting to the parent/ teacher on what the child is doing with the tablet/ PC running the Tutor. A 95%+ (98%?) accurate voice directed agent, like a servant, is highly desirable. It’s possible that chain of thought reasoning, with step by step explanations, can help students learn to duplicate it. Maybe excellent for 80% of folks.
I don’t really want Google, nor OpenAI, nor X or any non-local agent to be able to do my banking without my final case by case approval. But prepping all the info, accounts, & amounts, would be good.
An app maker for little apps would be good. I now want one to take an original video hit song & create a music only with lyrics on screen karaoke version. Probably using other music & video adjusting apps that a good human could already do.
All digital work now done by humans will soon be able to be done by aiBots, at about the top 80% level.
I wrote an epic novel in 2022, partly as a means of seeing what AI can do. The novel was very long and intricate, to the point where it was difficult to wrap my head around it all and make it consistent. I figured the AI could "fact check" the novel for internal consistency. It was fascinating how desperately incompetent AI was at that job! I'd feed it the same chapter five or six times, and get five or six completely different accounts, all of them fascinating, and with almost all details completely made up. I feel like I got lasting insight from that strange exercise.
The novel is still in a half-baked state, unfortunately. Since the virtual AI editor I planned on using didn't turn out to be up to the job.
My suggested use case: enrich public discourse by arguing with a ChatGPT bot. Here's an example of me doing it: https://substack.com/@lancelotfinn/p-145889900