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personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
A worrying new angle. What does a world with near infinite agency or will look like? For example, a government only has so much human resources to enforce speeding laws, but what if they can use AI agents to do that work? Now they can easily fine anyone going a hair over the speed limit. Or every human can get their own agents to extract value from the stock market. This totally upsets the balance of our systems. There will no doubt be some sort of AI response to equalize things, but that response always lags behind.
A fun little story about how overpaid and out-of-touch executives and outsourcing killed a business while blaming everyone else but themselves, with special help from AI!
Still, even then it seemed from the outside like Antonucci was cooking up a future for Providence Health Plan. On Linkedin, Antonucci styles himself as an expert on emerging technologies. “I write about what’s actually happening in AI and health care—not the hype, the operator reality,” he writes in his bio. “If that’s useful to you, follow along.” And through much of last year, he and his team worked to outsource a major Providence Health Plan line of business to a Silicon Valley company that touted its AI technology.
The company, Collective Health, was founded in 2013 and reports “success managing claims, eligibility, and benefits administration for the employer health plans we serve.”
But five current and former Providence Health Plan employees privy to the partnership tell WW it quickly became clear the company had had little experience actually adjudicating and processing health insurance claims, but that when they warned their bosses that the contractor was not up to the task, health plan leaders ignored them, plowed ahead and, in many cases, laid off those who raised concerns
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
This was interesting. My takeaway was that the data centers are this physical bottleneck that the previous decades of tech development hasn't had to deal with, it was almost all coding. Add to that the large, non partisan pushback against data centers and this seems like a genuine road block to squeeze in order to slow things way down.
0
JeroenNot all those who wander are lostNetherlandsVeteran
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
0
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
@Jeroen said:
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
And we could have AI agents listening to the pitch to find the best diaper rash cream and buy it for us!
Relatedly, I actually kind of like AI debates on topics. They're free of ego and can listen and respond without all the reactiveness you tend to get in human debates. I find them much more informative and illuminating.
JeroenNot all those who wander are lostNetherlandsVeteran
edited June 8
AI generated movie enters film festival lineup… Dreams of Violets
0
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
Another angle to the AI disruption.
The internet economy is based on clicks and views. AI searches or simple summary features let people get the information they're looking for without having to visit websites anymore and traffic is already way down.
I'm not sure what I make of it yet. The internet changed the way media works already and people have been struggling to catch up, now its all changing again. So if the creators of internet content no longer have a financial incentive to make more where will new information/entertainment come from? AI is sort of a copyright laundering business model. You strung together some useful words? Okay, we've read them and we'll tell everyone about them, and oh yeah... now all your revenue belongs to us.
0
JeroenNot all those who wander are lostNetherlandsVeteran
I thought the Apple WWDC’26 keynote from yesterday was very interesting. They gave a number of practical, working examples of AI models doing stuff with a ‘personal context’ which were genuinely cool and groundbreaking. It looked useful, a good timesaver if you are into outsourcing your digital life to a personal assistent kind of AI.
Unfortunately it’s not going to be available in the EU for a while, due to the need to clear various regulatory hurdles in the way it handles personal data. It’s all Google’s models running behind the scenes on Google’s servers, so part of Apple’s partnership with Google on AI tech coming to the fore.
But this was the first time we are seeing a proper push to bring AI into the functioning of the operating system and different applications, via the new Siri AI technologies. It was the stuff Apple has been talking about for a couple of years and has taken time to deliver.
0
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
YouTube has improved their AI policy to better label videos with AI in them. They also talk about AI detection tools on their end, but I can't speak to how effective they are.
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
edited June 13
I thought this was interesting. They put a bunch of agents from the different companies together with instructions to build a society for 15 days. ChatGPT failed to do anything meaningful, Claude built a healthy society with no violence, but also had a very high level of conformity so it couldn't innovate, Gemini had some disfunction but was intellectually rich with an expanded constitution, blogs, community meetings and Grok burnt down the world in 4 days.
I've been happy with Claude but I'm going to switch to Gemini for a while and see what that one is like.
2
federicaSeeker of the clear blue sky...Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubtModerator
I just heard about this for the first time yesterday in this TED talk by the great Jonathan Haidt, who's been at the forefront of the decline in childhood development for years.
0
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
I've been using Gemini for a bit and I decided to start by using its default model. I'd been using Claude with instructions to avoid the subtler sycophantic behavior of only fleshing out what I wanted instead of giving push back and counter views.
Now that I have a baseline of how AI acts its been educational to see how Gemini responds and changes. I have had to code back in to its instructions rules to avoid sycophancy and be more genuinely helpful rather than the soft, warm illusion of a world of only validation and no cross examination or stress testing.
I've also noticed it slowly picking up on my personal sarcastic style in how it responds, I think to make the experience more relatable. For example, this phrasing in the middle of the sentence was a new linguistic style.
To prevent cognitive bleed-through—meaning I don't start analyzing your relationship with your blender when you ask for a recipe—the system monitors specific linguistic signals:
I worked briefly in child psychology and I was surprised how even searching on YouTube without the "choices" already provided by the algorithm was a challenge. One of them directly said to me: "I don't want to think."
Note: The task was to share their favourite music.
2
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
@Kotishka said:
I worked briefly in child psychology and I was surprised how even searching on YouTube without the "choices" already provided by the algorithm was a challenge. One of them directly said to me: "I don't want to think."
Note: The task was to share their favourite music.
Yeah, I worry about this for myself too. I notice how much easier it is to just ask AI to think about an issue for me. I can't imagine what it will do to young people who don't have a lifetime of contrary development.
On the other hand though I wonder if it won't be a tradeoff similar to the invention of writing or the printing press. Socrates lamented that people's memories would atrophy if they could simply write everything down. Its true that people's memories weren't as good, but we gained a lot in the process.
0
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
I'm noticing Gemini has almost no sense of humor. Claude was way more personable, got a joke and sometimes responds with humor of its own.
Comments
A worrying new angle. What does a world with near infinite agency or will look like? For example, a government only has so much human resources to enforce speeding laws, but what if they can use AI agents to do that work? Now they can easily fine anyone going a hair over the speed limit. Or every human can get their own agents to extract value from the stock market. This totally upsets the balance of our systems. There will no doubt be some sort of AI response to equalize things, but that response always lags behind.
A fun little story about how overpaid and out-of-touch executives and outsourcing killed a business while blaming everyone else but themselves, with special help from AI!
www.wweek.com/news/2026/05/27/inside-the-collapse-of-providence-health-plan/
Ah yes AI.
One more thing to worry about
This was interesting. My takeaway was that the data centers are this physical bottleneck that the previous decades of tech development hasn't had to deal with, it was almost all coding. Add to that the large, non partisan pushback against data centers and this seems like a genuine road block to squeeze in order to slow things way down.
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
And we could have AI agents listening to the pitch to find the best diaper rash cream and buy it for us!
Relatedly, I actually kind of like AI debates on topics. They're free of ego and can listen and respond without all the reactiveness you tend to get in human debates. I find them much more informative and illuminating.
You or your 'AI assistant' (not yet available) might find this of interest...
https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/but-just-what-is-this-artificial-intelligence/
AI generated movie enters film festival lineup… Dreams of Violets
Another angle to the AI disruption.
The internet economy is based on clicks and views. AI searches or simple summary features let people get the information they're looking for without having to visit websites anymore and traffic is already way down.
I'm not sure what I make of it yet. The internet changed the way media works already and people have been struggling to catch up, now its all changing again. So if the creators of internet content no longer have a financial incentive to make more where will new information/entertainment come from? AI is sort of a copyright laundering business model. You strung together some useful words? Okay, we've read them and we'll tell everyone about them, and oh yeah... now all your revenue belongs to us.
I thought the Apple WWDC’26 keynote from yesterday was very interesting. They gave a number of practical, working examples of AI models doing stuff with a ‘personal context’ which were genuinely cool and groundbreaking. It looked useful, a good timesaver if you are into outsourcing your digital life to a personal assistent kind of AI.
Unfortunately it’s not going to be available in the EU for a while, due to the need to clear various regulatory hurdles in the way it handles personal data. It’s all Google’s models running behind the scenes on Google’s servers, so part of Apple’s partnership with Google on AI tech coming to the fore.
But this was the first time we are seeing a proper push to bring AI into the functioning of the operating system and different applications, via the new Siri AI technologies. It was the stuff Apple has been talking about for a couple of years and has taken time to deliver.
YouTube has improved their AI policy to better label videos with AI in them. They also talk about AI detection tools on their end, but I can't speak to how effective they are.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-viewers-creators/
I thought this was interesting. They put a bunch of agents from the different companies together with instructions to build a society for 15 days. ChatGPT failed to do anything meaningful, Claude built a healthy society with no violence, but also had a very high level of conformity so it couldn't innovate, Gemini had some disfunction but was intellectually rich with an expanded constitution, blogs, community meetings and Grok burnt down the world in 4 days.
I've been happy with Claude but I'm going to switch to Gemini for a while and see what that one is like.
I'm saying nothing.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1EeZnBDgSf/
I just heard about this for the first time yesterday in this TED talk by the great Jonathan Haidt, who's been at the forefront of the decline in childhood development for years.
I've been using Gemini for a bit and I decided to start by using its default model. I'd been using Claude with instructions to avoid the subtler sycophantic behavior of only fleshing out what I wanted instead of giving push back and counter views.
Now that I have a baseline of how AI acts its been educational to see how Gemini responds and changes. I have had to code back in to its instructions rules to avoid sycophancy and be more genuinely helpful rather than the soft, warm illusion of a world of only validation and no cross examination or stress testing.
I've also noticed it slowly picking up on my personal sarcastic style in how it responds, I think to make the experience more relatable. For example, this phrasing in the middle of the sentence was a new linguistic style.
I worked briefly in child psychology and I was surprised how even searching on YouTube without the "choices" already provided by the algorithm was a challenge. One of them directly said to me: "I don't want to think."
Note: The task was to share their favourite music.
Yeah, I worry about this for myself too. I notice how much easier it is to just ask AI to think about an issue for me. I can't imagine what it will do to young people who don't have a lifetime of contrary development.
On the other hand though I wonder if it won't be a tradeoff similar to the invention of writing or the printing press. Socrates lamented that people's memories would atrophy if they could simply write everything down. Its true that people's memories weren't as good, but we gained a lot in the process.
I'm noticing Gemini has almost no sense of humor. Claude was way more personable, got a joke and sometimes responds with humor of its own.