“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571
A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":
Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).
Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.
There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.
For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:
Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.
Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:
There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.
Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.
I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:
But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:
Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.
The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.
Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.
Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.
That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.
Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.
An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.
This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).
Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:
But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.
This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:
This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:
The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.
Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:
But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:
For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.
These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.
This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.
This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.
However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":
It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":
As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:
The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Rainy weather can make driving more challenging, but it doesn't have to be dangerous. By following a few simple tips, you can stay safe and avoid accidents.
Here are some tips for driving in the rain:
Slow down. The first and most important rule of driving in the rain is to slow down. Wet roads make it harder for your car to stop, so you need to give yourself more time to react.
Increase your following distance. You should also increase the following distance between your car and the car in front of you. This will give you more time to stop if the car in front of you brakes suddenly.
Use your headlights. Even if it's not dark out, you should use your headlights when it's raining. This will help other drivers see you and avoid accidents.
Turn on your windshield wipers. Wipers help to clear the rain from your windshield, so you can see the road clearly.
Be careful of hydroplaning. Hydroplaning is when your tires lose contact with the road and start to slide. This can be very dangerous, so you need to be careful. If you start to hydroplane, take your foot off the gas and steer in the direction of the skid.
Avoid driving through standing water. If you see standing water on the road, avoid driving through it. Standing water can hide potholes and other hazards, so it's not worth the risk.
Be patient. Driving in the rain can be frustrating, but it's important to be patient. Don't get angry or aggressive with other drivers.
By following these tips, you can stay safe and avoid accidents when driving in the rain.
Here are some additional tips that can help you drive safely in the rain:
Be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention to the road conditions and be on the lookout for hazards, such as puddles, debris, and other drivers.
Use your signals early. This will help other drivers know what you're doing and avoid accidents.
Be prepared to brake suddenly. The roads are slippery in the rain, so be prepared to brake suddenly if necessary.
Don't tailgate. Tailgating increases the risk of rear-end collisions.
Take breaks. If you're driving for a long time in the rain, take breaks to rest your eyes and clear your head.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
when you are driving / riding in a vehicle and a car — going the opposite direction — flashes their high beams, what is your initial assumption?
I wouldn't think anything of it
they're warning about an upcoming speed trap or road hazard
they're warning for something about your vehicle (head light is out, etc)
they're about to pass someone in their own lane
they're being an asshole
something else not listed (feel free to add your thoughts) / see results
Voting ended onApr 16, 2024
*this poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. if you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please go to our profile and check our pinned post)
You wait in the passenger seat in front of my house. During our last driving lesson you had a hard time stopping your eyes from wandering over my body. Now your eyes are focused on my door, curious to see what skimpy outfit i chose today. Then you reprimand yourself, whatever it is you have to stay professional. She is so much younger, and those outfits don’t mean anything. Right? And those seemingly naughty smirks and glances she gave you are probably imagined, that’s just how she looks at everyone. Yes, this is just a normal driving lesson, be professional.
I walk out the door and you see me walking in front of the car towards the drivers seat. Your lips part a little when you see how tight and short my black skirt is. Black high heeled boots trotting quickly towards the car. I get in and we start chatting while i remove my short leather jacket. You smell my sweet vanilla perfume when i toss the jacket to the back, your eyes noticing and swiftly looking away from my cleavage in my red top.
We start the lesson and after a little while end up in a traffic jam. Unable to do anything we chat a bit. We get comfortable and laugh. But my smile keeps lingering towards you and it makes you confused. You ask me why i’m looking at you like that. “Oh, nothing.” I say. Suddenly getting shy and looking out my window for a second. “I was just wondering.. if you are busy after our lesson?” Still processing what is happening you look at me with confused expression. “You.. you want to do something together?” Yes, i say. My hand lightly running over your thigh, from your knee going upwards. “Yes, let’s do something together.”
You almost trip over your words when you want to make it clear that we can’t do such a thing. Your body is reacting strongly, your cock twitching, your eyes needing to be locked on my body, your hands itching to touch me. But your mind is telling you to be careful. This is too dangerous, you can’t afford to lose your job. She might just be of official legal age but the age difference is too big, this could cause trouble one way or another. No, no!
Still stuck in traffic we sit in awkward silence. You made yourself clear. Nothing is happening. Ok, fine, whatever. I look outside a bit grumpy and sigh lightly. When we finally get a move on, you direct me to drive towards a forest. “But our time is up and this is the opposite of my way home” i say. You look straight ahead out the window and say sternly “just do it”. A nervous feeling is firing up in my stomach and my thoughts start racing. What is happening? Where are we going? What are we doing? I thought he said..
Your directions bring us to an old abandoned factory at the edge of the forest. You tell me to park the car behind the building in the parking lot and turn off the engine. We sit in silence for a second, then i get up and get out the car. Standing in front of it, you watch me taking my top off. I turn around slowly, bend down a bit, arching my back. My fingers grabbing my thong from underneath my tight skirt and pulling them down. You open your door and get out the car, while i walk towards you. I swing my thong in your face while i pass you by. You take it in your hands, feeling the damp fabric, you shove it under your nose, taking in my sweet naughty scent.
You find me leaning against the car, my hands behind me resting on the trunk. My breasts moving along in my bra with my heavy breathing chest. You step forward, my feet between yours, i feel your bulge pressing against me. “Is this what you want?” You ask, while your thumb moves across my lower lip. “Mhmh” i mumble moaningly, without moving my lips, not wanting to lose your touch. Your thumb enters my mouth and automatically i close my lips around it. Now looking up at you more desperately. I feel your bulge grind into me harder when my tongue swirls around your thumb inside my hot naughty mouth.
I feel my pussy pulsating so intensely it makes me wonder if you can feel it. My hand reaches to your back and my fingernails dig into you. Your thumb leaves my mouth, your body distances from me and you order me to turn around. Clearly i don’t react fast enough because your voice is deeper and sterner now you command me again. “Turn. Around.” I mutter a soft “yes sir” while i do as i’m told. Leaning over the trunk of the car, my ass up towards you. I hear you undoing your belt and the magical sound of unzipping your trousers which drives me crazy. My pussy now throbbing so hard in anticipation, i’m squeezing my thighs together trying to contain the urgent feeling. You come closer, stroking a finger down my spine so gently it gives me goosebumps. Then suddenly a hard slap on my right ass cheek. “Ahh!” I scream and my body jolts. “Easy, little girl” you say, as you caress my freshly slapped ass cheek and move my skirt up. “Spread those naughty legs for me, now.” I do as i’m told and i feel the fresh air breezing against my pussy. Until your fingers cup and squeeze me. A firm slap on my pussy follows. “Ahh!” I scream. Then a slap on my left ass cheek. I scream again but in my mind i want to tell him to just fuck me already. Yet i’m too horny to form proper sentences. Your fingers slide between my lips. “Ohh, your little pussy is so wet.” I moan desperately in response. “What did you say?” You ask, leaning over me, grabbing my hair towards you. I feel your big hard cock sliding between my thighs up against my pussy. “What is it, little slut, use your words”. Moaningly i whimper “please.. mmm please fuck me”. Not letting go of my hair, your other hand on my hip, i feel your cock rubbing against my pussy lips, soaking up my juices. The tip finding my yearning wet hole, you ram it in suddenly. I scream again, ohh my god yes. YES. It feels so good. Filling me up just the way i hoped and dreamed of. Thrusting into me steadily, you let go of my hair and both your hands slide under my bra, moving it up. Groping and squeezing my breasts roughly. When you pinch my nipples i feel my pussy tightening around your cock. Panting and groaning loud, my tongue hanging out my mouth while being pounded so hard and fast. Just when i feel myself nearing orgasm you push your body weight onto mine and grunt into my ear how you’re going to fill my tight little slutty pussy. The air formerly silent with only bird chatter, now filled with loud groans and desperate moaning. My legs start to shake and tremble, my pussy tightening around your big shaft pumping me full with a load of thick hot cum. We both explode and melt together in extasy. We keep the same position while we catch our breath, until eventually you pull out and release yourself from me. While we straighten ourselves out and get back into the car i say teasingly “next time, can i ride you instead of the car?”
