I Automated My Friends and Nobody Could Tell the Difference

https://latenightcoding.co/i-automated-my-friends/

by rcymerys • 9 years ago

63 12 9 years ago

Using her authority gave it enough power to get the team gather up for a call.

This is why I think the slackbots OP wrote were so effective. When you give a bot a name like MeetingBot it's easy to ignore the notifications. However when the bot carries authority of a manager or team member it's harder to ignore.

hdhzy• 9 years ago

It's also a question whether the activities are really important if you need tricks like that (pretending to be the authority) to get people to act...

JamilD• 9 years ago

And if your bot is sufficiently spammy, it could end up diluting your own authority!

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

I actually think this is where the first "general intelligence" AIs will come from: people will train AIs to be them. It will start out running little bits of our lives, but eventually you'll be able to take whole days off with AI you doing your job.

I read a short story about this... a neural implant that starts off in passive mode, learning to be you, and then you switch it over to active mode at some point and you are it.

Interestingly, this makes an end-run around the whole "what if AIs have power but no morals?" question... the first AIs will have human morals because they'll be clones of humans.

ashark• 9 years ago

I read a short story about this... a neural implant that starts off in passive mode, learning to be you, and then you switch it over to active mode at some point and you are it.

"Learning to be Me" by Greg Egan?

I read it in the short story collection (various authors) Beyond Flesh

jodrellblank• 9 years ago

And the trick with Egan's jewel (Dual) was at the point where you go for surgery and they remove your biological brain and replace it with an energy sink, and leave only the jewel mind with an identical neural network running in it.

Characters who self-identify as the biological brain consider it death, and being replaced by a machine.

Characters who self-identify as the jewel being bootstrapped / trained by the biological brain consider it no big deal, like removing training wheels from a bicycle.

That distinction stuck with me hard, for years. The same reality, different levels of suffering.

Seems to me like the only way to deal with something like dementia is to have a worldview where you aren't surprised and confused and afraid to wake up and not know who you are, where you are, or who people around you are. To have plans now for how you'd cope with it.

Because if you don't have that worldview now, in advance, you won't be coherent enough to change to it when you need it.

Or if you're going through a clone/destroy teleporter, or being mind-uploaded into FaceBook 2070, or get alcohol induced long term memory formation problems, or are going to offload parts of your thinking to brain implants or desktops ... lose your identity now, so your pattern won't include suffering later as it carries on.

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

Yup! Seems right. Although I'm sure I read it in the browser a few months ago and I can't find it now.

dwe3000• 9 years ago

Reminds me of a quote/thought (I don't recall the original source): The worst waste of time is to improve (automate) something that doesn't need to be done.

I've been there myself. I was asked to deliver to email a report that anyone could get at any time by opening a browser, but they wanted an email instead (their communication path - if our office used IM/Slack more, I can easily see them wanting that instead of the email).

derekp7• 9 years ago

That makes sense to me -- active vs. passive receiving of information. Which is why mailing lists are still popular, instead of message boards.

fao_• 9 years ago

I launched it on Monday morning and waited for the laughs. But nobody noticed.

I should imagine that's one of the biggest insults anyone could receive. Woah.

cbhl• 9 years ago

I can't help but think that this is what Google Wave was supposed to be. But Slack is what actually enabled people to build little bots like this for everything.

thelastestate• 9 years ago

In Frank Herberts Dune, the fremen walk without rhythm to avoid the great sand worms. I wonder if, not too far away from now people will begin intentionally varying their intonations and body language randomly to avoid detection...

I Automated My Friends and Nobody Could Tell the Difference

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