(2024-02-13) Hon S17e09 What Does It Take To Trust The Young Ladys Illustrated Tour Guide

Dan Hon: s17e09: What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide

1.1 What does it take to trust?

I’ve thought out loud before about what would be needed for a useful, intelligent assistant, most recently back in s17e04. (2024-01-11 HonS17e04YouDontWantAnIntelligentAssistantProtocolsNotPlatforms)

That time it was about how the Rabbit R1 hardware-enclosed LLM assistant had struck peoples’ attention

Google released its Gemini assistant (Google Gemini)

*Allison Johnson’s review of Gemini in the Verge was super interesting and caught my attention in the headline, never mind further down:

Google’s Gemini assistant is a fantastic and frustrating glimpse of the AI future / It’s useful, but it’s also thoroughly Google*

I wrote before that you don’t want an intelligent assistant, but perhaps the more interesting and provocative question is: under what conditions would you want a useful intelligent assistant? (intelligent software assistant)

The deal is that the useful intelligent assistant -- like the useful valet or executive assistant or secretary -- would know so much about you that they’d know intensely private things about you. Perhaps even things that you would wish to keep secret from the closest people in your life.

What might that look like? Bearing in mind that some of these requirements are more like a wishlist and on the “well, that would be nice, but it would be impossible or unrealistic”.

the point I’m making here is that these unicorn wishes come from a place of present (and valid, in many cases!) distrust.

You wouldn’t want it to make mistakes, but humans make mistakes all the time

from a business point of view, Google’s going to make the case that the best useful assistant is one where as much of your life is stored in Google systems (context)

Apple would make the same case. In fact, anyone would.

One company that strikes me as somewhat fucked in this situation is Microsoft

What would it take for you to trust such a useful agent with all that information about you? What’s the minimum that it would take? And, in some sad sense, does it even matter, given the current state of trust around security and privacy in online services?

Perhaps one way of thinking about this is the risk model.

What about low-probability, but stupendously high impact, like going to jail for having an abortion?

Connect Apple Health to your EHR using something like Epic, and you’re potentially there already, regardless of whether Siri or whatever LLM-powered replacement comes about this year.

1.2 The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide

I’ve seen now a number of stories of people using Gemini/Bard/whatever while traveling, with the observation that it’s been very useful to them. More useful as a tour guide, I think, than as a general purpose assistant.

Often the nearest example from science fiction for this type of agent is The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age.

The other thing that crops up is the example that the early codename for Amazon’s Kindle while it was in development was Fiona.

Perhaps the Illustrated Tour Guide is a closer, more achievable goal than the replace the entire education system goal of the Illustrated Primer.