The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I've been thinking about surrendering an increasing level of access and control to AI. Possibly just giving email read access. I had a long conversation with AI about it, but I'd like some real human feedback. It feels like a no return point, but maybe google already scrapes my email.
It would help if you articulated what, exactly, you aim to accomplish, as well as what your reservations are. I personally wouldn't, but I also don't find LLMs to be especially useful for the vast majority of things I do. I certainly wouldn't give them access to my computer, if that is what you're thinking of doing. Giving a stochastic piece of software with no understanding of what it is doing access to your computer is a pretty foolish decision, IMO.
Accomplish: saving time and energy on email and maintenance of basic life stuff. I want to make sure im not missing bills, personal emails that are important, or that a routine email of some sort doesn't also contain important information I need to know about. There is a low effort version of this that I've arrived at that only takes about 30 minutes to an hour a day. I do miss things with this level of effort. But probably get 60-90% of the information i want/need. I'm unsure on the exact range of what I'm missing because some things are nice to know and I won't get a second change to learn about them. Other things are important and tend to have multiple reminders. Some things are important and don't have multiple reminders.
Testing so far: I've been experimenting in a limited file system on my computer. Basically just making a mod for a silly game. The AI's I've used have tended to be overly cautious and have made small and minor changes. They have undoubtedly been useful. As in converting 5-10 hours of my effort into approximately 1 hour of my effort.
Can you guarantee that my brain isn't a stochastic piece of wetware? How a thing arrives at intelligence doesn't really seem important from a utility perspective to me. If its a philosophical objection I am somewhat more on board.
Giving free access to my computer for wetware systems happens pretty regularly. My wife has all access to my digital life. The main impediment for her is just her time and willingness to read all the shit I write. My kids have access to my system most of the time, and they just aren't really capable of doing much harm. There are probably a half dozen friends and most of my family I'd give access to my computer as well without much worry. Its just a matter of practicality and logistics that they don't have access.
I didn't provide many initial details. That was intentional. I wanted to see how people reacted to the basic thing without prompting in a particular direction. I've thought about and explored some of your areas of worry, and they are just not areas where I also worry.
Based on the use cases you mentioned, I guess I can't really say much because it seems like our situations are too different for me to really relate. I spend minutes on email every day, if that, and my bills are almost all paid with automatic payments so I can't miss them. So, it wouldn't make much sense for me to use any additional tool to optimize that, because the level of effort is so low already that it doesn't bear mentioning. It sounds your situation is rather more complex than mine, though.
I agree that humans are not deterministic (I'm a believer in free will). But unlike an LLM, a human is capable of understanding things and reasoning about them. A human is also, unlike an LLM, capable of learning and responding to incentives. Your kids might hose your computer (they are kids, so it's to be expected they will make dumb mistakes), but they will learn. They can also be steered away from some things by laying out consequences. All of this makes humans lower risk to give free rein than an LLM.
It seems to me that asking for advice without giving details about the use case is just going to cripple the advice you get. That's why I asked for more info (though it turns out I can't give you decent advice for your situation anyway, c'est la vie). But to each his own, of course.
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