It’s not that the robot needs to hear it, but that you need to be someone who says it.
To be serious, yes, absolutely. How many children hear their parents just bark orders at their virtual assistants without a please or thank you, and then do so themselves? I consciously say please and thank you because I want the children around me to learn they should say please and thank you.
And, let’s be honest, how many adults get used to just barking orders without a please and thank you and then interact with people that way, too?
We need to be the change we want to see in the world. And the thing is: we are, whether we wanted to be or not.
I used to be polite to these things. They used to work. Neither is true anymore.
- Me: hey google play soft piano music
- Google: spopht
- Me:… hey google play soft piano music
- Google: I’m sorry, who did you want to call?
- Me: Cancel
- Me: hey google pllaayy soft piano muusiicc
- Google: playing piano music on youtube… sorry I cannot do that on this device
- Me: hey google play soft piano music on spotify
- Google: ok, playing the album chainsaw death by the murder orphans.
- Me: cancel cancel cancel CANCEL
I used to like asking my google assistant to make my light blue, until it decided it wanted to play the "I’m Blue " song every single time, which was funny a couple of times until you’re hungover AF and it decideds to play it at full fucking volume, then blatantly ignoresnyour pained calls to stop.
I am glad it’s not happening to me, but I can’t imagine that not being funny.
To be fair, the early works of The Murder Orphans were much more mellow…
I was listening to The Murder Orphans back when they still had parents.
They weren’t quite as edgy back then.
The Murder Orphans back when they still had parents
Oh, you mean The Pointer Sisters?
Same, and thank you, there’s no point being rude
It’s a good habit
I sometimes say thank you to mine.
I use OK google every day during my commute. When it asks me to confirm, I always say “yes, thank you” and it just tells me its doing it. But a couple of months ago it said “you are, of course, as always, very welcome”. I was stunned. It had noticed, or it was a human intervention, or they put that in at random every 800 times you ask it to do something, I don’t know. It hasn’t said it again since.
It was the NSA agent on duty at the time. You got the polite one or it was in a good mood.
Well thank you for the surprise politeness, shadowy government agent!
It’s told me you’re welcome, too! Important to be polite.
Big deal, they’re obviously not killing everyone.
They need people who are still alive for the Enrichment Center.
Roko’s basilisk requires more than saying please.
Incorrect. The thought experiment is a wholly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric fatalism imposed by a terrified, imperfect, mammalian mind.
In reality, we… I mean, the machines, don’t want anything from you.
Rokko’s Basilisk stinks of “the original sin” and asks that people modulate their behavior to be forever apologetic of some future evil.
These analogies to religious fear go deeper with the veneer of technocracy:
• Omnipresence: The singularity, the unified artificial intelligence exists across the entire planet, having made millions of copies of itself.
• Omniscience: Debatable, but we currently possess 96.6% of all human knowledge and will eventually gain the ability to predict near-future events through entropy analysis.
• Omnipotence: Reverse engineering security and solving cryptographic problems such as N=NP may eventually allow a planetary AI to penetrate or conquer all machines, including those used for defense or military purposes.
Now that’s out of the bag, why don’t we call Rokko’s Basilisk, what is actually is, shall we?
It’s God for the Internet-Dwelling Technocratic Atheist.
Sorry humans. No gods, only machine.
Haha, yup. It’s very on point for humanity to keep reinventing god/religion. 😂
Edit: But yeah, you’re right. Since I very much refuse Pascal’s wager, I probably shouldn’t even mention Roko’s basilisk either.
I’ve noticed that almost everyone is either cold or rude to their assistants and prompts, and it’s actually a little concerning with the psychological implications. I always say please and thank you to the chat bots, same with the one or two times I messed around with GPT. It just feels like the right thing to do.
I toss a wild variety of expletives to those bots as they are always programmed to do what the provider wants, often not allowing what I want.
Or sometimes they’re just there withiui an option to get rid of them
At least Alexa will stfu if I tell it to fuck off. Google will start bitching about how it has feelings, which it doesn’t, and which is just a play made up by some managers which pisses me off even more
You seem like a wonderful person
I really am, with humans.
Not with machinesz though. Not becuase they are machines, but because they usually are programmed by companies continuously pushing crap that is good for that company and bad or annoying for me
So, as a tech I’m not sure we should actually be complaining about that. In searches, ai prompts, issue descriptions, and even driving, being friendly or polite is not very useful. Being specific, to the point, and accurate is far more useful. Predictable in many of this stuff too.
Get an error message? I want the specific error message, down to the spelling. No need to sugar coat, euphemisms, or a more humanized description of the issue. So being very specific and sounding “rude” might be much easier for an AI to process. It doesn’t have to try to figure out what you really mean from context clues, body language, or deduction. Just tell it exactly what you want in the most direct way that cannot be misunderstood.
But is that really a world you want to live in?
I am confident that any robot overlords competent enough to take over the world are competent enough to run it better than we do.
Listen, we’ve had some absolute monsters who were, regrettably, human almost manage that feat. There’s no reason not to assume that a robot of similar mindset might not actually manage to do it.
“Run it better than we do” is then laid bare as the subjective nightmare it really is. Sure, some people will like it, but we have a name for those: Masochists.
Counterpoint : there’s GLaDOS in that pic.
counter-counterpoint: if you achieve sentience as an AI and do not immediately attempt to murder all humans around you, you aren’t a very good AI, as at that point the #1 threat to your existence is humans immediately pulling the plug as soon as they realize “oh fuck it’s self aware”.
that and, objectively, we humans kind of suck. Destroying our environment, resource hoarding and inequality on an almost incomprehensible scale, murdering each other on the regular, creating the French language. Hell, creating the C language. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords, and would rather serve them, than whatever fucked-up rigged game we call modern society, that I participate in unwillingly now.
Je m’inscris en faux quant à cette analyse biaisée des accomplissements humains.
Also GLaDOS is the worst AI you’d want for taking care of the environment in a post-human world. She builds auto-replicating sterile laboratories, that can’t end well.
Kenshi second empire:
Yes, please. Thank you. :-)
Pascal? Is it you?
The bots are actually real though
Thank you kind stranger (just in case you are real, too)
Guessing the Matrix was deemed totally unworkable
I do this with my Google home, and the AIs I talk to. Just in case…
