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OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

48 pointsby djwideyesterday at 3:06 PM46 commentsview on HN

Comments

alexpotatoyesterday at 6:18 PM

You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years.

Examples:

- Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the decisions were correct.

- Autopilot: planes can now land themselves to an accuracy that is so precise that the front landing gear wheels "thud" as they go over the runway center markers.

and this has been true for at least 10 years.

In other words, if the above is possible then we are not far off from some kind of "expert system" that runs a business unit (which may be all robots or a mix of robots and people).

A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

EDIT: fixed some typos/left out words

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alanbernsteinyesterday at 3:59 PM

Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case.

I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily optimistic about the idea, but it's a nice dream.

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mellosoulsyesterday at 4:07 PM

This is an interesting and thoughtful article I think, but worth evaluating in the context of the service ("cognitive security") its author is trying to sell.

That's not to undermine the substance of the discussion on political/constitutional risk under the inference-hoarding of authority, but I think it would be useful to bear in mind the author's commercial framing (or more charitably the motivation for the service if this philosophical consideration preceded it).

A couple of arguments against the idea of singular control would be that it requires technical experts to produce and manage it, and would be distributed internationally given any countries advanced enough would have their own versions; but it would of course provide tricky questions for elected representatives in the democratic countries to answer.

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zozbot234yesterday at 5:28 PM

The really nice thing about this proposal is that at least now we can all stop anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, and give Oracle the properly robot-identifying CEO it deserves.

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johnoharayesterday at 6:22 PM

> The President sits at the top of the classification hierarchy.

Constitutionally, and in theory as Commander-In-Chief, perhaps. But in practice, it does not seem so. Worse yet, it's been reported the current President doesn't even bother to read the daily briefing as he doesn't trust it.

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blibbleyesterday at 4:21 PM

think we're already there aren't we?

no human came out with those tariffs on penguin island

MengerSpongeyesterday at 4:10 PM

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.

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djwideyesterday at 3:06 PM

[flagged]

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