Prepare for That Stupid World

https://ploum.net/2025-12-19-prepare-for-that-world.html

by speckx • 7 months ago

175 96 7 months ago

valleyer• 7 months ago

The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

I fear the author has missed the point of the "Project Vend" experiments, the original write-ups of which are available here (and are, IMO, pretty level-headed about the whole thing):

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2

The former contains a section titled "Why did you have an LLM run a small business?" that attempts to explain the motivation behind the experiment.

ipdashc3• 7 months ago

Yeah, I haven't read the WSJ article, but I did read the original Anthropic experiment and I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here. This is effectively just something they did for fun. It's entertaining and a funny read. Not everything has to be the end of the world.

rdiddly2• 7 months ago

The point is that it's an ad. No company spends money on a joke just to make a joke. Not the end of the world, although it's interesting that all the end of the world stuff comes directly out of that joke and its universe as it were. Take the joke seriously and extend its logic as far as it will go, and you get the end of the world. It's a thought experiment, or that's how I read it anyway.

sschnei8• 7 months ago

To be fair they could have done an experiment on a transaction that typically requires a person in the loop. Rather than choosing a vending machine which, already, does not require a person in the loop for the transaction.

welferkj• 7 months ago

I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here.

I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.

AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?

sudhirb• 7 months ago

The partner for these projects has a benchmark that the top frontier LLM labs seem to be running on their new model releases - I think there's _some_ value to these numbers in helping people compare and contrast model performance.

https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench

barfoure3• 7 months ago

It’s a milquetoast rant but I got nothing - the employee is right. You should prepare for the world and stop acting so shocked. You had decades to call out journalists for being paid mouthpieces but you didn’t because they spewed nonsense that you agreed with and benefitted you.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Prepare for what happens next. FAFO.

rdiddly2• 7 months ago

Yes, that's how I solve all problems. I can't do anything now, because I didn't do anything before. It's my rule of thumb. Never start doing things!

dkdcio• 7 months ago

I also enjoy the implication everyone has had decades to do something about journalism —- I’ve barely been an adult for a decade, my bad I guess!

lo_zamoyski• 7 months ago

Ressentiment is like this. Steeped in envy and vindictiveness, rather than looking for ways to save the situation, it wills the destruction of others.

It has always exited, but its overt forms are very much in vogue today and even celebrated publicly.

barfoure3• 7 months ago

You’re welcome to try but something tells me people resort to these satirical takes precisely because they (you) are powerless to do anything of significance.

You are welcome to continue posting nonsense but the world will move forward with AI with or without you.

everdrive• 7 months ago

You had decades to call out journalists

If only I could get any journalists or companies to actually listen to me.

NoGravitas2• 7 months ago

It's your own fault for not being born to billionaire parents.

jeffbee• 7 months ago

It's a pretty solid point, except that the credulity of the journalist is not in contrast to their "world-class" status. They are a gadget reviewer.

Shalomboy2• 7 months ago

The author hints at this idea with their title and their closing remarks, but it feels like the folks selling LLM services are selling insurance to white collar workers. I wish they had expanded on this observation more, rather than harp on the WSJ puff piece for being silly.

derektank• 7 months ago

I’m curious, has the author seen or read any of Joanna Stern’s other reporting before? Her stories are often silly frames that explore the experience of using consumer technology. She’s not an aggressive industry reporter, her purpose is to explain or reveal what the user experience of new technology is, often for an unsophisticated audience. See for example her story about using conversational chatbots while out camping[1] or how to use tech to unplug from tech[2]. This seems like a perfectly fine niche for a writer and the vending machine story is of a piece with her past work.

[1] https://youtu.be/hUyj3d-BSh8

[2] https://youtu.be/POl7UYwBpWw

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

This article can serve both her beat and also, this story in its specifics and that she/her editors chose to report it, self-congratulatory and also advertisements for Anthropic and WSJ itself. Both your statement and this blog can be in agreement.

zkmon• 7 months ago

Prepare for That Stupid World - is actually a very sober advice. Looking at the past few decades, it is easy to see that with each tech innovation, the world only got stupider, childish and lazier.

gdulli2• 7 months ago

My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.

I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.

Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.

Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.

armchairhacker• 7 months ago

Can you search for “the word ‘wife’”?

jonasenordin• 7 months ago

Tell it to "always when I search for quoted text, pretend you're the Galaxy S20 gallery app"

polynomial• 7 months ago

Seems like a fairly straight forward UX fix on the engineering side: parse whether the user is searching for wife, or "wife"

stronglikedan• 7 months ago

the world only got stupider, childish and lazier

Humans do trend toward their natural state, and technology accelerates the trend.

sallveburrpi5• 7 months ago

Looking at the past few decades […] the world only got stupider, childish and lazier.

insert obligatory throwback quote from some antique dude complaining about the youth

This has been a trope since literally the beginning of civilisation. I don’t think it’s any more true or insightful in the modern era

paddleon• 7 months ago

I don’t think it’s any more true or insightful in the modern era

hmm, based on what evidence?

Or, if you prefer, based on what appeal to authority? Did you actually quote that authority properly or did you just wing it? Can you properly quote many authorities?

If you don't have good answers to those, then perhaps you have just proved the your opponents point?

Maybe there is a reason people need more compute in their key fob than what our parents/grandparents needed to pilot their ship to the moon?

wiseowise2• 7 months ago

We have a generation which doesn’t know how to use computers anymore, thinks that floppy disk is an emoji and is literally addicted to virtual drugs.

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

It's not just the youth who are lazy and stupid and childish though. (you added in the youth portion.) Do you know who the American President is and how old he is and who then voted for him?

NoGravitas2• 7 months ago

People have been saying the last few months that "everyone is twelve". Waiting for the bar to drop.

littlecranky67• 7 months ago

I had recently contact the official support email (support@bunq.com) of Bunq - a Neobank (like N26 and Revolut). Because they notified me that they changed their T&C and I never really used the account after the kyc (because they rejected my tax filings), I figured I let them know that I do not agree to the new T&C and want to terminate my account and have my data deleted.

Since the T&C update came - of course - from no-reply@bunq.com I went to their website and quickly found out, unless I install their App again, there is no way to do anything. After installing the App, they wanted me to record a selfie, because I was using the app from a new device. I figured that is a lot of work and mostly somewhat unreasonable to record a new selfie just to have my data deleted - so I found their support@bunq.com address.

And, of course, you guessed it, it is 100% a pure AI agent at borderline retard level. Even though it is email, you get AI answers back. My initial inquiry that I decline the T&C and want to terminate my account and my data deleted via GDPR request was answered with a completely hallucinated link: bunq.com/dataprotection which resulted in immediate 404. I replied to that email that it is a 404, and the answer was pretty generic and that - as well as all responses seem to be answered in 5 minutes - made me suspect it is AI. I asked it what 5 plus five 5 is, and yes, I got a swift response with the correct answer. My question which AI version and LLM was cleverly rejected. Needless to say, it was completely impossible to get anything done with that agent. Because I CC'ed their privacy officer (privacy@bunq.com) I did get a response a day later asking me basically for everything again that I had answered to the AI agent.

Now, I never had any money in that account so I don't care much. But I can hardly see trusting a single buck to a bank that would offer that experience.

tolerance3• 7 months ago

A part of me wants to be dismissive of this blog post

1) because dude, it’s the Wall Street Journal; the entire episode should be viewed as Anthropic preparing to Ollie into an IPO next year.

2) I’m starting to interpret a lot of blog posts like these as rage bait

But I do get the point that the author is trying to make.

I just wish that there were some perspectives on the subject as a whole (AI’s sloptrod into every crevice of human life; modern technology and society and general) that don’t terminate on ironic despair.

TrainedMonkey• 7 months ago

The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine?

This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.

Having said that, I do feels the overall premise of the blog - the world dynamics seems exceedingly irrational in recent times. The concerning fact is that irattionality seems to be accelerating, or perhaps it is keeping pace with the scale of civilization... hard to tell.

gipp2• 7 months ago

This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.

That's... exactly what the author said in the post. But with the argument that those are cynical and terrible reasons. I think it's pretty clear the "you" in "why would you want an AI" vending machine is supposed to be "an actual user of a vending machine."

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

Anything that's an "extremely good business move" will most likely, in this day and age of late-stage capitalism and extreme enshittification, be negative for the consumer.

Good business moves can often be bad for humanity.

jcstk6• 7 months ago

Any information that comes to you for free or is on a screen is an advertisement. All of it. That's the point. Do you think people spend millions and billions of dollars creating and maintaining a content delivery network because they just want you to know about things?

deadbabe• 7 months ago

What if people could pay to read an advertisement?

6510• 7 months ago

Almost as good as my idea to have people pay me to work for me.

Had a great business idea just now: A tool for staged interviews! The subject and the journalist submit an equal length list of questions. Each round of the auction they bid on questions they want to include or exclude. The loser gets 50% of the points spend by the winner to be used in the next round. Both the subject and the journalists can buy additional points at any time. I keep all the money.

sallveburrpi5• 7 months ago

Damn so all of HN or literally every single piece of digital media has just been an advertisement all this time ?

devinprater• 7 months ago

What are you trying to sell me again? :)

jcstk6• 7 months ago

HN is an advertisement for Y Combinator. You and I contribute content to advertise our identity and ego.

layer82• 7 months ago

Your comment comes for free on my screen. :thinking_emoji:

jcstk6• 7 months ago

It is an advertisement.

etbebl• 7 months ago

Well, of course almost all information comes with an agenda, but perhaps the more useful distinction is whether the information is presented in good faith, i.e. is honest about the agenda (which actual advertising can also be).

wiseowise2• 7 months ago

Some of us grew up in a world where “journalism” used to mean something.

jcstk6• 7 months ago

No, that was just good advertising in an era where there were few entities that could afford to broadcast at scale.

erfgh• 7 months ago

What about wikipedia?

jcstk6• 7 months ago

The free encyclopedia is an advertisement for a nonprofit that does a lot of things: https://wikimediafoundation.org/what-we-do/. They manage costs of producing the encyclopedia by using volunteer labor. They operate a similar model as nature documentaries that drive donations for conservation and climate groups. These are all good things - still an advertisement.

brador• 7 months ago

It was always tasks reaching obsolescence, but now it’s the human organism. But the human as a unit is the only known conscious being in the universe, the only entity capable of generating meaningful goals (even if only to them) not related to the 4fs.

Humans were just not needed anymore, and it terrifies.

neogodless• 7 months ago

What are "4fs"? Is that the "4X" e.g. games where you eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate?

stryan• 7 months ago

The four basic actions in evolutionary biology: Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, "Mating".

sallveburrpi5• 7 months ago

Other beings than humans have demonstrated consciousness and “meaningful” goals besides humans. Crows for instance, but there are many others.

Humans were never needed (for what?)

kittikitti• 7 months ago

This is a great take and one that I align with when it comes to the AI vending machine experiment. Journalism in English has become a mouthpiece for fascist leaders and corporations, nothing more. Places like The New York Times have incredible gaps in their journalism at the price of increasing shareholder value.

gary_0• 7 months ago

Douglas Adams was bang on about how comedically unhelpful advanced technology was going to be. Every ridiculously convoluted user interface and neurotic computer he thought up (or worse) is imminently going to be our daily life.

mrandish2• 7 months ago

I've cited Adam's Sirius Cybernetics Corporation so many times in relation to AI chatbots... Somehow he foresaw all this back in the 80s.

hereme888• 7 months ago

Think for one second. One full second.

99.9% of social media comments fail to do this.

jollyllama• 7 months ago

Great article. Key quote:

What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"

Techies are finally starting to recognize how framing something as "it's inevitable, get used to it" is a rhetorical device used in mass communications to manufacture consent.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857 'LLM Inevitabalism' 5 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288371 'This is not the future' 3 days ago

andyfilms1• 7 months ago

I'm terrified for the future this rhetoric itself will cause. Young people are being told not to go into certain fields because they're going to be replaced by AI by time they graduate.

What happens in 4-5 years when we suddenly have no new engineers, scientists, or doctors?

Young people don't have the life experience to know how unrealistic these claims are, all they can do is act on the information as it's presented. It's irresponsible at best, and evil at worst.

Shalomboy2• 7 months ago

There will still be new engineers, scientists, and doctors by then. But aptitude won't be a factor in who matriculates into those fields anymore. That's the worrying part.

mlsu• 7 months ago

This piece is pretty ineffective. Not that I like the world of "AI", I probably share the author's opinion that its just another evolution in the bullshittification of the human experience.

But, the point of the article is not that you would implement an agent based vending machine business. Humans restock the machine because its a red-team exercise. As a red-team exercise it looks very effective.

Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

Like this is like watching the simpsons and being like "why are the people in the simpsons yellow? people in real life aren't yellow!!"

The point isn't to run a profitable vending machine, or even validate that an AI business agent could become profitable. The point is to conduct an experiment and gather useful information about how people can pwn LLMs.

At some level the red team guy at Anthropic understands that it is impossible by definition for models to be secure, so long as they accept inputs from the real world. Putting instructions into an LLM to tell it what to do is the equivalent of exposing an `eval()` to a web form: even if you have heuristics to check for bad input, you will eventually be pwned. I think this is actually totally intractable without putting constraints on the model from outside. You'll always need a human in the loop to pull the plug on the vending machine when it starts ordering playstations. The question is how do you improve that capability, and that is the anthropic red-team guy's job.

layer82• 7 months ago

The point isn't to run a profitable vending machine, or even validate that an AI business agent could become profitable.

Having an AI run an organization autonomously is exactly the point of Andon Labs [0], who provided the system that WSJ tested.

[0] https://andonlabs.com/

andai• 7 months ago

Yesterday Anthropic released their video on the vending machine experiment:

https://youtu.be/5KTHvKCrQ00

It's a bit sparse on details, but it did have what in a human we would call a psychotic break.

I find this very amusing in light of OpenAI's announcement that GPT now solves >70% of their knowledge work benchmark (GDPVal). (Per ArtificialAnalysis, Opus is roughly on par.)

The economy is about to get... Interesting ;)

tim3333• 7 months ago

The economy has had a lot of foolishness going on even without AIs involved.

snickerbockers• 7 months ago

Someday the mcdonalds kiosk will want to be your friend. It will remember who you are and ask you how your kids are doing. It will recommend new specials and maybe even give you "specials friend" deals. And I'll just tell it to shut the fuck up and queue me an order for the egg mcmuffin combo with a coffee and the fried potato patty because this bullshit is fucking obnoxious.

blablablerg• 7 months ago

Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century.

Yes, but as stated by the Anthropic guy, a LLM/AI running a business is not. Or would you just let it run wild in the real world?

And I agree that there is a PR angle here, for Anthropic could have tested it in a more isolated environment, but it is a unique experiment with current advancements in technology, so why wouldn't that be newsworthy? I found it insightful, fun and goofy. I think it is great journalism, because too often journalism is serious, sad and depressing.

None of the world class journalists seemed to care. They are probably too badly paid for that.

The journalists were clearly taking the piss.They concluded experiment was a disaster. How negative does the author want them to be about a silly experiment?

This was just a little bit of fun and I quite enjoyed the video. The author is missing the point.

vishnuharidas• 7 months ago

It was blockchain a few years ago. Everything was on blockchain for no apparent reason. I guess that 2026 will be like "Grab our AI-cooked sandwich with AI-picked ingredients, built on multi-model agentic toaster"

whynotmaybe• 7 months ago

And then the "gluten free haircut" barbers will finally jump the bridge to "AI Free haircut"

spit2wind• 7 months ago

Excuse me if someone already asked and I missed it: how does one prepare for such a world?

Is it some Viktor Frankl level acceptance or should I buy a copy of the Art of Electronics or what?

Advice welcome.

chunkmonke992• 7 months ago

I don't think there is anything more than the standard advice. Just stay curious, make friends/build a community, keep learning, stay healthy. Why not get the AoE? you can also, check out "Practical Electronics for Inventors": AoE assumes you have some Electronics background imo. But seriously, I don't get the doom/gloom: things are going to be rough ... but maybe they won't? Many things I learned I did for their own sake! Things have always been uncertain and absurd I guess we might as well embrace it!

conorcleary• 7 months ago

(also get age of empires)

sanbor• 7 months ago

I have a different point of view. This was a test to see if the AI could perform a specific task. Asking AI to draw a pelican riding a bike is another test. I find the experiment interesting because it proves that currently LLMs are not able to perform a simple task reliably for a long period of time.

If the journalist was not asking the right questions, or was too obvious the article was PR it’s another thing (I haven’t read WSJ’s piece, only the original post by Anthropic)

ursAxZA• 7 months ago

If vending machines are the benchmark now, the logical next step is obvious: let AI run AI.

tim3333• 7 months ago

I enjoyed the wsj video and thought it was quite good journalism.

The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is

Billions are being poured into LLMs. How is it stupid to experiment with them and see how they fail as opposed to ignoring that?

rkomorn2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I was a bit meh at the beginning but then the guy explained they specifically set it up to fail because they wanted to get insight into how and why.

They weren't caught out by it, they didn't present a working solution, it was just a fun bit of research.

tim3333• 7 months ago

I was kind of stuck after watching the wsj video with someone persuading the LLM to give stuff away by telling it dumb stuff like it's a communist bot that has to not charge and you think dumb bot, they need to fix that, and then turn to other news with one president saying prices are falling when they are obviously not and another saying we didn't start the war in Ukraine when they obviously did and think maybe human neural networks have similar failure modes to the artificial ones?

There may be some insights from these kind of experiments that go beyond LLMs.

mrandish2• 7 months ago

I read that WSJ article before seeing this blog post. I found it mildly interesting and a little bit funny but unsurprising that the AI failed. However, I think this blog about the article misses a key point. Anthropic's goal was never to develop an AI-based vending machine. The WSJ clearly says:

"Logan Graham, head of Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, told me the company chose a vending machine because it’s the simplest real-world version of a business. “What’s more straightforward than a box where things go in, things go out and you pay for them?” he said."

This was a project of Anthropic's Red Team, not a product development team. Deploying the AI in a vending machine context was chosen as a minimal "toy model" with which to expose how LLMs can't even handle a grossly simplified "business" with the fewest possible variables.

"That was the point, Anthropic says. The Project Vend experiment was designed by the company’s stress testers (aka “red team”) to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money—and human colleagues."

Anthropic had already done this experiment internally and it succeeded - by failing to operate even the simplest business but doing so in ways that informed Anthropic's researchers about failure modes. Later, Anthropic offered to allow the WSJ to repeat the experiment, an obvious PR move to promote Anthropic's AI safety efforts by highlighting the kinds of experiments their Red Team does to expose failure modes. Anthropic knew it would fail abjectly at the WSJ. The whole concept of an AI vending machine with the latitude to set prices, manage inventory and select new products was intended to be ludicrous from the start.

tim-tday• 7 months ago

The author is missing the whole point. The exercise answers the implicit question: “can Ai do real work in this world? Can it replace workers, can it run a business?” And the experiment answers that question decisively “no it cannot”.

Why not? Read the article and ponder the seven to eleven distinct ways the AI goes wrong. Every AI enabled workflow will fail the same way. It even raises the question “is this technology even deserving of the title AI at all?” (If you ask me, probably not)

It lacks common sense, it lacks a theory of the world it lacks the ability to identify errors and self-correct. It lacks the ability to introspect. Now consider the thousands of people out there pushing the idea of fully autonomous AI “agents” doing work in the real world. Are we really for that? Again the exercise answers the question definitely. “No, the technology is not ready and cannot be trusted, and maybe in the current incarnation (Namely LLM based) cannot ever be trusted”

Now consider the tens of millions of people who think the technology IS ready for that. Anthropic is in the business of studying AI safety, publishing research, examining what AI is and how far we can trust it. They did that job smashingly.

inatreecrown2• 7 months ago

some of the most intelligent things I read this year.

Prepare for That Stupid World

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