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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

https://www.researchagenda.news/articles/the-waymo-effect.html
81•JohnHammersley•1h ago

Comments

qoez•1h ago
Collaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.
mosura•1h ago
There's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people.

The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

watwut•50m ago
Wut? AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people". Instead we are all having to deal with negative side effects of AI.

AI is imposed on us, whether we want it or not.

>which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

Like, OpenAI and Antropic? Because these two are the primary entities a.) pushing for regulation of their competitors b.) doing their best to convince us that AI is oh so dangerous and will kill us all as vengeful AI god is about to wake up any day now c.) openly bragging about using AI to hack other companies.

mosura•46m ago
> AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people"

Quite literally the subject of the article.

watwut•21m ago
Article: someone enjoys being alone in the car, because they dont want to talk and find it impossible to be in the same space as other people without talking. And apparently end up arguing over radio each time they are on the 20min long car drive or something.

I think I would prefer to be alone rather with them too based on that.

mosura•14m ago
So basically you don’t understand english and/or don’t have the life experience to understand the context of the article.

But you are very angry about it.

Being able to avoid people like you is the entire selling point. No wonder it annoys you.

ozlikethewizard•42m ago
Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats? This is a ridiculous take, large swaths of the population are against AI, most people are concerned about resource use, their livelihoods, and a destruction of the human element in so many crafts.
mosura•31m ago
> Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats?

Not what was claimed.

Tanjreeve•13m ago
So just dismissal via association or what was your point?
mosura•8m ago
The absolute trolling that goes on here is related to the point.

You are entirely capable of checking what I wrote but insist on trying to drag this out with straw men and misinterpretations.

Of course people like you have a problem with AI since it will help everyone else move on and ignore you.

spongebobstoes•28m ago
using AI makes an individual more capable and empowered. this views AI as an accessible tool, like AWS or a nail gun

individual empowerment threatens institutions

meowface•53m ago
This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)
SirFatty•49m ago
and silently.
s08148692•48m ago
And I read it by asking an LLM to summarise it
bayindirh•41m ago
Can you share me the summary? I'd like to read a LLM summary of your summary.

Things are bit tight today.

scronkfinkle•43m ago
I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct.

I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.

mlinhares•21m ago
That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.
fithisux•48m ago
The social content or science of development vanish.

People become islands working on something without the bigger picture.

This is very dangerous.

chrisjj•47m ago
> the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being

Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.

wazoox•43m ago
I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours...

And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.

duskdozer•30m ago
This falls short because not being forced into chit-chat and music is very pleasant, but chatting with LLMs instead of collaborating with other people on a project is not. These aren't equivalents.

>humans are social animals

with varying social needs

Forgeties79•30m ago
A whole idea of a fleet of self driving cars for all of us to use just to further isolate ourselves and clog up our roads is just awful to me.
spongebobstoes•33m ago
with AI, one person can accomplish much more

collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits

Forgeties79•32m ago
Do we really need to have this debate again? About how the quality of the “what” is the issue?
maddiaa0•31m ago
This is the exact same thing that we have been seeing in open source software.

The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not

skybrian•28m ago
For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.

And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.

If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.

Xirdus•18m ago
Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.
Frost1x•21m ago
I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science.

Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.

I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.

It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.

It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.

varjag•13m ago
Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.
21asdffdsa12•7m ago
We are going back to philosopher conversations. Just a few guys sitting on the stairs, with chalk, the street as their whiteboard, the jammer keeping the LLM-zombies away. After 2000 years, after the loudness makes right post-modern-pre-llm drivel of the frankfurter school- its a philosopher renaissance as resistance.
ricardobayes•17m ago
How come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.
n4r9•14m ago
LLMs require massive datasets and massively parallel algorithms for processing them.
philipwhiuk•13m ago
There’s lots of ways of attacking the problem sufficiently to get to 95% and we’ve spent decades on object recognition
ipsod•13m ago
Nobody knew that LLM's were an option. The architecture was basically waiting there for someone to say, "do that, but turn it up to 11," if I understand right.
pingou•10m ago
Why would self driving be easier? Good text generation implies some general level of intelligence, while driving is more specialized.
shawabawa3•8m ago
> How come self-driving came years before LLMs

Did it? Outside of very limited testing zones, self driving _still_ doesn't really exist

penteract
mccoyb•4m ago
AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc.

Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it.

Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially if someone doesn’t realize they don’t understand: they couldn’t teach or explain the concepts they use, or be forced to work with them malleably in a way that an expert or researcher would.

If you are cognizant of your lack of understanding, you can remedy it by slowing down and teaching yourself. This is required to make better use of AI in the domain of interest!

But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain.

zamadatix•4m ago
Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written.

At this point I'm floored when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone!

happytoexplain•42m ago
Is "quietly" an LLM tell? It was always certainly a human writer trope commonly seen in journalism. Though I guess it does appear five times in the body of the post, and a human writer would probably not go that far with it.
embedding-shape•40m ago
I think individually and when used sparingly, writing tropes can be fine, but when the article has every second sentence being a writing trope, it becomes pretty obvious that either a LLM wrote it, or the author simply doesn't know how to write, and regardless, it's a waste of time trying to read through it.
duskdozer•40m ago
It genuinely is--and that's the honest truth.
embedding-shape•39m ago
Which, given the section below from the article, ends up kind of ironic:

> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.

I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.

mobilejdral•34m ago
This comment was perhaps written by an LLM that has learned it can karma farm by pointing out all of the articles that have LLM usage while everyone still thinks that is a novel contribution.
throwawaysleep•30m ago
People aren't treating it as a thoughtful contribution. It is more of a flag, like "spam".
cj•26m ago
HN already has a feature for that. Just flag the article!
happytoexplain•5m ago
I appreciate when people write things like, "this is an advertisement for the author's product, X." Why stay silent? If the commenter's accusation smells fishy, I'll read the article myself. Otherwise, they helped me.
fidotron•29m ago
In the spirit of the "That's what she said" bot, you could train an LLM detector by accusing everything of being authored by an LLM and seeing which ones get voted up.
meowface•20m ago
If you check my comment history here, I have not written this before.

I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.

happytoexplain•8m ago
"Novel" is not a prerequisite for something to be worth pointing out. Lots of bad things happen repeatedly, and don't quickly become not worth caring about or knowing about. People have strong spirits and curious minds and it tends to take a long time to boil that frog out of them - generations, sometimes.
Oarch•18m ago
You're absolutely right—it's been a load-bearing LLM tell for a while now.
dash2•7m ago
Is it OK to flag articles for being AI-written? I really want to.
internet2000•4m ago
No, it is not.
inanutshellus•6m ago
Instant armchair pundit: just add tokens!
•
4m ago
a) Self driving was far from completely solved before LLMs.

b) Text generation essentially means passing the Turing test, which for a long time was the bar for general intelligence. Locomotion does not necessarily require general intelligence.

The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

https://www.researchagenda.news/articles/the-waymo-effect.html
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