Pickaxes and shovels and whatnot.

Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life expectancy.

* I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn carriages!"

We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running the Torment Nexus.”

Maybe that's for later, if this works out, but I'd love to see the AI attempt to run a moderately successful business in a borderline dysfunctional town in the Midwest. If you don't technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g. a grocery store in a dying town. One this would really test the AI on creativity, and it would perhaps tell us if these towns are just doomed.

But maybe people will forget eventually.

Really it's an excuse for the company to test all the harnesses and tools they have built to make it work.

“John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone.”

which was refreshing to read.

I don't think we need to have real human risk to get results from the experiment.

That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people.

But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that all their interactions with the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's employees".

And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go. Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the information for any accurate determination.

> She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.

Like OK, it's hiring people to run the place, but how are they getting the keys to the store? Someone needs to physically let them in.

What if the police get called because of shoplifting or if someone gets hurt in the store or something?

Who is filing the taxes for the business? They're probably not letting the AI handle that one. Move fast and break things is not a good idea when dealing with the IRS

A lot of this seems to depend on hiring good employees who can basically run the business themselves. Kind of like when a human owns a store I guess.

She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras

“PC LOAD LETTER”

And one person’s attempt doesn’t mean anything

According to Linkedin articles, agentic workflows dont work, mine have been running for a year for several organizations I’ve worked for. Prompting used to be much more particular and now its not the issue

If we are talking about the one at that newspaper, it wasnt just unprofitable. The "customers" made it give away products for free. It was ordering them playstations.

As entertainment it was fun, but as a business or proof of intelligence or Turing test, it was an abject failure.

It doesn't look like this one will be any better. Did you look at the merchandise selection? It's only chance is pity purchases from AI bros.

But also, like, normal hierarchical memory management.

The entire thing is actually kind of irritating to me, because it's kind of an insult to small farmers- an influential techie comes in and generates all kinds of hype about an AI running a farm, sets the project up as if it's going to be this revolutionary experiment, then apparently completely forgets about it the next time something new and shiny pops up. Meanwhile the project completely fails to fulfill the hype.

Not to mention, I feel a little bad for the agent- admittedly in the same way I'd feel "bad" for a robot repeatedly bumping into a wall. I wish he'd shut it all down, honestly.

> The moment Leah asks how she “came up with” the ideas for her store, Luna’s first instinct is to say she was “drawn to” slow life goods. Then, she corrects herself: “‘drawn to’ is shorthand for ‘the data and reasoning led me here.‘” In other words, she doesn’t have taste; she has a reflection of collective human taste, filtered through what makes sense for this store. And this is the way these models work.

I'm guessing these are the same type of people who sometimes seems to fall in love with LLMs, for better or worse. Really strange to see, and I wonder where people get the idea from that something like that above could really work.

At least this furthers humanity's scientific and technological knowledge, whether it fails or succeeds, unlike most other things people would do with that money, like buy a house to flip it, or buy a car, or sth.

Which is why the comparisons to 19th century textile workers is so common, since that was an equally visible and gleeful displacement.

It writes code okay, scaling up to pretty well depending on the model. It's writing is boring but serviceable for corporate communicative content you don't care about. It's images are ugly. It's music is repetitive and dull.

I think the biggest problem with LLMs is that they were perfected and are shockingly good at writing code. And based on that, AI engineers, who find writing code to be hard/rewarding, have decided it can do anything. And it's proving more and more that it cannot.

Unfortunately the Business Class has decided it does everything fine enough as to not cause riots, so we're all getting it shoved into our shit anyway.

People anthropomorphize. Nobody really finds it "jarring" in most contexts.

(might try to see if I can swindle Luna, the agent running Andon Market, into cutting a deal for investment)

No, it's still dark. This is very similar to the initial stages of the capitalist dystopia in Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna), which seems to be the Torment Nexus SV is excited about building.

AI will never replace capitalists, because they're the only people allowed to have abundance without work. And don't you DARE to even THINK to question the absolutely SACRED status of private property (peace be upon it). There is no alternative. Get back to work, you slacker.

Sorry for confusion!