
Hey Zuck We Built Your Office AI - madrafi
http://blog.algorithmia.com/hey-zuck-we-built-your-facial-recognition-ai/
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throwaway2016a
I wrote a similar system for my own home quite a while ago. It didn't have all
the features of Zuckerberg's but it had a lot of things it doesn't too.

The real mystery is why do all the existing home automation systems kind of
stink. Although it's not much of a mystery, it's because every company wants
to be proprietary and no one wants to work together because if the system is
closed they can get you to buy their hardware exclusively.

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jbpetersen
I'm waiting for pay-as-you-go automation services with good federation between
them. That's the only model I see being practical long-term.

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bryanrasmussen
Yes - then the single home automation service can be free, and all the
functionalities of the system aside from the basic play music one will be
unlockable as you pay.

Then whenever you walk into a room that is dark you can get a message on your
smart phone - 'access automatic light control for only $.99 a month!'

hmm, maybe I'm cynical.

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jbpetersen
I imagine it being more like I say "computer, set the lights to forest green",
that speech gets crunched by a well trained neural net (or sequence of them)
to determine an appropriate reaction, then the fraction of a cent compute
costs get added to my monthly bill.

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bryanrasmussen
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he
told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed
it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed
when you bought this conapt."

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and
shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969

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jbpetersen
I may have to take advantage of that book recently appearing on a nearby
shelf.

A modern take:

My door refused to open.

The sign displayed on the door's handle in my arhud grew more prominent than
it had been when I was ignoring it a few moments ago. It briefly flashed an
alarming color in time with an almost painful buzzing on my wrist.

A stern and feminine voice began reading the message in my airphones: "Your
citizenry is too low to enter this residence. Please report to the nearest
reconciliation center or schedule a relocation to a dwelling available at your
citizen level."

I spoke aloud: "I am loyal to the party that best serves us as citizens of
this great nation. Please allow me express entry to recover my jacket for the
cold walk to the nearest reconciliation center."

The stern feminine voice piped back up in its usual fashion of chastising me
from a position centered within my skull: "Temperatures for the next hour are
expected to remain above 5 degrees Celsius. Your loyalty has been noted and is
appreciated by your fellow citizens."

The door remained locked to me.

I went back out into the rain.

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vogt
Phenomenal, very cool. Publicly announcing the arrival of everyone in Slack
seems a little gross if for instance someone has special circumstances which
require them to come in later that may not need to be public information. Or
could potentially brood that weird competitive mindset of "I'm the best
because I show up at 7:30 when everyone else comes in at 9-9:15, even though I
may not be the most skilled". It is definitely fair to say that this stuff
being a problem is indicative of something deeper in the office culture
anyway, though.

Other than that I love this and 10/10 would pay for it on a monthly basis.

~~~
Waterluvian
That's always my fear about one day working for a big company. I'm not a good
drone. I'm probably the most firable person if you look at me on metrics
alone.

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vogt
I work for a company of ~120 people who are owned by a fairly giant company (I
think ~5000 but could be way off, I forget) and we don't treat people that
way. You really have to work hard to vet the environment you're going into as
an employee, but it pays unlimited dividends when you get it right. It has
taken me several times now.

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frik
Zuck is right (and before Gates in 1995 "The Road Ahead" book). We need a
common API, so that AI agents can interact with various types of hardware
(home automation, IoT) as well as other AI agents over the internet.

I propose we should use JSON rest based simple API with simple english words.
To agree on things, AI agents should be able to bid against each other, like
in auctions.

In Bill 1995 vision, every interaction costs (micro payment). We all learned
how the free internet with WWW sponsored by advertisement et al won over his
pay-as-you-go The Microsoft Network as found in Win95. But how will
advertisement work with agents? How will big search engine providers get payed
in an mainly AI environment. This has to be solved. Also Zuck and Bill wanted
to have their own locally installed agent on their own hardware, something
that has charm but is contrary to 2010s trend of software-as-service/cloud.
But I can imagine that in a few years, our personslized AI agents surf the
internet and interact with other agents, and we less and less visit websites
or apps ourself, but directly interact with our agent.

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vessenes
This is so awesome. I want you guys to package it up and sell it for $5.99. Or
$1.99/month. I would buy if it were zero config; we've got lots of tablets
lying around and would hack it into plenty of different use cases if it were
up and running.

At any rate, nice work!

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usgroup
Expounding the benefits of humans living like machines so that machines might
be more useful to humans. I think the carrot is very much that we are subduing
time to our control.

Maybe this is the way it should all go ... but the depths of me resonate much
more with finding the simple ways to be in harmony with the world.

Akin to a closed form formula where an algorithm may have been.

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sfblah
This isn't a good idea. Productize it.

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Splendor
> "We have some cleanup to do on the code before we’re ready to share the
> sample app"

Has this been shared now?

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cbsmith
I don't think Zuck or anyone else thought that the AI demoed was particularly
hard to build...

