At least 70% of things I read about people doing with "AI" assistants like "Open Claw" are basically things people have been doing with deterministic, secure tools like Home Assistant for years.

Oh you can tell your bot to dim the lights via WhatsApp chat? Welcome to 2015!

@tante They want it to feel like a personal secretary who can't say no, not like a CLI. That's the whole appeal to them.

@dalias @tante

I think a better term may be "latent human desire for slavery"

@downey @tante Yes, though I'm not sure what "latent" implies here. I don't think it's something intrinsic - most of us find the idea repulsive, and this is probably part of our visceral reaction to "AI" "assistants". Rather, I think people who've been indoctrinated into hierarchical power structures where they observe their bosses "getting to" behave like that develop it as an aspiration. And for the bosses, the appeal is that the thing they're giving orders to like it's a person can't say no to them and can't be secretly trying to achieve goals at odds with them(*).

(*) LMAO that's exactly what all the "AI" chatbots are doing when they scoop up all your trade secrets for Google and Microsoft to exploit.

@dalias @downey @tante this is a very perceptive analysis of language
jnkrtech (@[email protected])

This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.

Treehouse Mastodon

@dalias @downey @tante big social pressure in the workplace, for the people who actually do the technical work, for the "progression of their career" to be moving upward in the management hierarchy and move from technical to administration

as if management is inherently more important than doing the actual thing the company does

@dalias @downey @tante

And then you realize they have all watched movies where the assistant is a woman, has the voice of a woman, has the name of a woman

@downey @tante Another take on this concept:

"AI" "assistants" are crack for crackers.

@downey I don't know that it's so universal as that. It does seem to be mostly other white people who are enthusiastic about AI in this particular way.