Comment by pixel_popping

4 hours ago

I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.

Agreed, "fully autonomous businesses" is the evolutionary next step for spam.

Spamcorp services are the future. Don't resist it, that would be futile.

I challenge you to explain a business plan for a fully automated business that isn't at least a bit shady.

  • Coordinating philanthropy and charity ? Low-commission employee recruiter? I'm thinking any intermediary that's not producing something new.

  • Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.

    • > I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city

      I'm curious about things of this nature, where it seems like a case of "this information is important to me and I want accurate results".

      But then the talk of automation seems to exclude careful human review of those results, which is needed to stop hallucinations from making their way to customers.

    • > I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms.

      If this can be fully automated then you can just ask your own agent to do this and wouldn't need a business for it. And agents can already fill out web forms just fine.

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    • > Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided.

      No kidding.

      > One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental.

      We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shrink the supply of limited-availability goods in the market, then gate access to them behind a paywall, and you don't even have to do the minimal amount of actual work required to fleece strangers for part of their paycheck while creating no value.

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I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.

Considering the disaster of that AI-powered store in San Francisco, I'm skeptical that this could happen in the next wave. Or even the next ocean.

(WSJ article from a few weeks ago stated that the "AI" can't stop ordering candles, and manages the staff so poorly that sometimes there are no employees scheduled for some shifts.)