alt Hacker NewsPrepare for That Stupid World
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday Anthropic released their video on the vending machine experiment:
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 ;)
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"
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)
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?
> Think for one second. One full second.
99.9% of social media comments fail to do this.
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.
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.
There's no (long term) point getting bent out of shape about this sort of thing. Every time we invent some new, widely applicable technology people will use it for all kinds of weird and seemingly pointless things. Most don't pan out or are simple gimmicks that lose their appeal after a while but some do work and continue on. It's just part of discovering what's possible, what works and what doesn't so being a curmudgeon about it is useless at best or will memorialize you as humorously incorrect for the rest of time.
When electricity was "the hot new thing" people tried all kinds of bizarre and seemingly insane things with it, at least from our modern perspective.
Things like:
The Electric Table Cloth, one of the first "wireless" home gadgets https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/hgemyu/an_ele...
The Schnee Bath, because what's better than a bath for healing and relaxation? An electrified bath! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr._Schnee%27s_four-...
The Solar Bath Apparatus, they say sunlight is good for your health so let's turn it up to 11 https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolRidiculous/comments/15h7ce...
and there were many others whose initial designs were incredibly inefficient or dangerous but which turned into real products that we still use today after refinement. Toasters used to just be the bare heating element and left you in control of handling the toast with a long fork or tongs. The original electric blanket was a metal pan with a lightbulb in it that you used to warm up your bed. Some of the first electric razors just added a vibrating motor to a normal safety razor. The great-grandfather of electric lighters was a fireplace poker that heated up like a soldering iron so you could jam it into your fireplace to light it (and you can actually still buy these! https://www.dopogrf.com/product-p-769347.html).
So let's just laugh at the funny and quirky uses people are coming up with for AI rather than being a grouch. It's entertaining and we will probably get some really useful inventions out of it in the long run.
> 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.
I had recently contact the official support email ([email protected]) 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 ([email protected]) 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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