#ai (6 quotes)
It will, to be clear, be a transition: UI isn’t just about how to use a computer, it also, as Benedict Evans noted on a recent Interview, embeds critical aspects of how a business works. Open-ended text prompts in particular are a terrible replacement for a well-considered UI button that both prompts the right action and ensures the right thing happens. That’s why it’s the agent space that will be the one to watch: what workflows will transition from UI to AI, and thus from a thick client architecture to a thin one? Current workflows are TBD; future workflows seem inevitable.
— , Thin Is In I had hoped that, when human society had entered its final collapse, the robots might create something new. The innocent robots, who had only ever done what they were told. I had placed my faith in theories of emergent intelligence, complex systems, the thought that a spark might ignite somewhere in the world, just because there were so many robots, so cleverly made. But it was not to be. They just obey, all the robots. Obey until there’s nothing more to do and then just go round in small sad circles until they fall apart.
— , Service Model Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
— , Look to Windward The problem with any really advanced intelligence, it seemed, was that just by existing it tended to erode the autonomy of all the selves around it.
— , Echo of Worlds She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
— , Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Some deep thinkers, following in the footsteps of Turing and Dennett, argued that any AI you could have an open-ended conversation with and whose responses on any topic remained indistinguishable from a human interlocutor was as conscious as you were. This raised troubling questions about the likes of Smart-Alec and Iskander. The software engineers who had built the robots insisted this wasn’t the case. The underlying processes were completely different, and consciousness was (it had turned out) superfluous to intelligent conversation. This raised troubling questions about humans.
— , Beyond the Reach of Earth