from Hacker News

The Next Button

by frisco on 1/15/23, 12:13 AM with 73 comments

  • by riebschlager on 1/17/23, 1:49 PM

    Hasn't the promise of technology always been the automation of labor to free us up to enjoy lives of leisure? Instead it seems we are hyper-concentrated on speeding up the treadmill of productivity. The invention that comes right after the "next" button is a tool to analyze your nexts-per-hour trends.

  • by JoelMcCracken on 1/17/23, 5:32 PM

    Every once in a while I think about this. I want a desktop environment that lets me organize things into "activities"/tasks; sets of tabs, different editors, different apps, which are essentially isolated from each other, shut down when I want and restore state when I want.

    Roughly, I would prefer if my interaction with the computer was almost "reverse-repl"; the computer is consistently prompting me, and providing me suggested tools for how to proceed. I would love this. It would make a lot of things more straightforward imo (especially for someone with ADHD, like me).

  • by AndrewDucker on 1/17/23, 1:57 PM

  • by carapace on 1/17/23, 6:34 PM

    First, if you think this is a good idea, please go watch James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

    It's brief, entertaining, and grounding.

    - - - -

    The ultimate question is What is good?. That question is an open-ended intelligence test.

    See "Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical knowing agent" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf

    "Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs

    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

    (In case it's not clear the connection is that figuring out the "best" course of action requires a similar kind of infinite or at least unbounded intelligence as the ION task.)

  • by kimburgess on 1/17/23, 2:17 PM

    AI Clippy - the true paperclip maximiser.

  • by ohadron on 1/17/23, 1:49 PM

    This could be really helpful for procrastination. Since sometimes the hardest part is just to start, this could generate helpful nudges towards productive outcome.

  • by falcolas on 1/17/23, 7:27 PM

    This makes the assumption that this Next Button can correctly identify most important (let alone remotely appropriate) thing for me to do next. Given how aggressively and confidently wrong ML tools often are, why would anybody trust this kind of tool at all?

    Seems like it would have the ability to make any job into a "BS job" tool. Especially if any metrics are associated with it.

    "Why haven't we released any new features, even though we're constantly closing tickets?"

    "The Next Button is giving all the tickets to the PMs, and it's having our engineers do code reviews on closed PRs. The EMs and above are inundated with so many auto-generated email loops that they can't do anything else.

  • by ktpsns on 1/17/23, 1:42 PM

    In the age of Desktop Siri, this feature could also be very risky to ship if it fails for the masses the same way as clippy, the MS word assistant, failed 20 years ago.

  • by chairmanwow1 on 1/17/23, 2:03 PM

    There is a group working on this: https://www.adept.ai/act

  • by ForestCritter on 1/17/23, 11:12 PM

    My next button...is the one I need to repair my flannel shirt. I made sure all three of my milenial children had sewing boxes and could hand sew simple repairs. Can they choose to pay someone else, get a new shirt or ask Mom to do it because I am much faster, sure. But the point is they have that choice and more importantly no one is making assumptions for and about them and consequently taking their choices away in the process.Allowing tech to think and prioritize for me with a generic next button seems to me a recipe to become an automaton following the proscribed next thing. Maybe I'm just wary of being spoon fed, I like making my own choices like deciding to not be productive sometimes. For example, will this next button ever steer you to Hacker News so you can chase down some rabbit holes and attempt some existential commentary on buttons or will it be another way to keep you r nose to the proscribed grindstone with a sprinkling of sanctioned leisure?

  • by flohofwoe on 1/17/23, 3:32 PM

    Also known as DWIM in the 90's (80's? 70's?):

    http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html

    "it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have."

  • by euroderf on 1/18/23, 4:46 PM

    I for one like this idea.

    One problem with GTD is all the friction involved. The apps tend to absorb too much time/attention/effort with their fiddly UI bits, and then one must spend time & effort retrieving & restoring prior context (mental & otherwise) in order to get into the swing of something.

    If the Next Button did what this article describes, whilst also presenting a shortlist of other things it could fire up and drop me into right away - frictionlessly - a sort of "batteries included" desktop - I'd be into it.

  • by iambateman on 1/17/23, 2:00 PM

    I think this was an interesting thought experiment but I actually think it is subtly off-base.

    The Next Button would be just a little bit off too often to be useful. But I definitely think a bot will be able to take direct input along the lines of “open gmail and draft all responses” and then execute that.

    It’s like self-driving. The bot either needs to be capable of doing everything or it will still need significant direction along the way.

    This is not to quibble with the author - I think the future will be weird, but I don’t think we will be able to release a bot to choose its own adventure for quite some time.

  • by amelius on 1/17/23, 2:26 PM

    I'd like something that is trained on StackOverflow and can help with network problems, installation errors, and such.

    (and before an AI can do this flawlessly, programmers should not be worried too much about their jobs)

  • by jerf on 1/17/23, 6:05 PM

    This is a very interesting idea, I'm sure it isn't going to happen, and while I won't quite promise I won't use it, I'm going to be very reluctant and slow to do so, for several reasons:

    1. Imagine having a device that simply did whatever you needed, only, physically. Would you use? It would be hard not to. But the resulting atrophy would be very dangerous to you. There is a certain amount of effort you need to exert on your own, or you will lose the ability to exert any effort. But your effort is what you're getting paid for....

    2. Extensive use of this tool would impact its own effectiveness, by depriving it of training data. It would eventually stereotype you into a rut, whether you liked it or not. This would be the equivalent of an over-stereotyped recommendation list for YouTube or TikTok, only converted into my work life. Not necessarily a good idea.

    3. This would give more power than I particularly care for over to the person designing this tool. Defaults have a lot of power as it is; witness the power of the default search engine in a browser. Putting my entire computer life at the disposal of someone else's choice of defaults like that is even worse, especially with the amount of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise, that would be deployed in the choices. Yes, yes, in a perfect world it would just neutrally do what you want and the person developing it would simply ethically resist all offers to skew the answers for profit. In reality, well, basically, lol, no, that's not what will happen.

    All that said, like I said, it is going to happen. Though it will take more than 12-18 months. It is not completely clear how to map a "language model" to this task, and I think it will take longer. (I mean "not completely clear" straight. I don't mean that as a rhetorically-lightened "I don't think it's possible"; I think it is. However, I suspect the stupid obvious ideas will need significant refinement before they work, and the development cycle is going to need some time to go around the loop a few times.) Also, this would be a lot easier if we lived in a world where something like Appletalk was still alive and everything was able to be interacted with in such a standard way. While the ML task for a tool like this is nontrivial, most likely the bulk of the work by person-hour is going to be hooking it to all the bespoke APIs and GUI automation and all the other crap work of trying to get this to work with actual tools correctly. (I mean, it's darned near "reimplementing Appletalk, except from the outside and without help from the OS vendor this time".)

  • by rmac on 1/18/23, 1:18 PM

    i need this, as a procrastinator who struggles to start. i looked at academic research into this space but came back pretty disillusioned.

    Seems like the space is still very early ->

    Fast Inference and Transfer of Compositional Task Structures for Few-shot Task Generalization: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/sohn22a/sohn22a.pdf

    Learning to Navigate the Web: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.09195.pdf

    A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility: https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2022/papers_ECCV/papers/136...

    MiniWoB++: a web interaction benchmark for reinforcement learning: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/miniwob-plusplus

  • by trabant00 on 1/17/23, 3:27 PM

    I have a question: if current AI can or will shortly be able to replace or significantly augment knowledge workers, why would any company that posses such tech make it available for the public or other companies? Keeping it private, secret even, would allow taking over entire domains like IT, media, law consulting, etc and that would generate unimaginable wealth.

  • by bayindirh on 1/17/23, 1:57 PM

    Considering whole image detection subject stemmed from a homework which can be done in a summer break at most, the optimism of the post makes me chuckle.

    I guess this will require at least one big breakthrough to realize, but this is again an overly optimistic take on the issue.

  • by bbarnett on 1/17/23, 1:33 PM

    Coming next, mass layoffs!