I must re-read that book, I don’t recall that passage. It must have been 20 years or more since I last read it.
Chapter 16, following the fracas that got Bernard and Helmholtz sent to an island. Mustapha Mond and John (the Savage) discussing “happiness and stability” v high art.
A member of a white supremacist cult in rural Washington fell out of a tree and died while trying to illegally pick mistletoe.
TIL what mistletoe actually is. I never gave it any thought beyond the fake plastic ball of leaves.
Both the Celts and the Norse thought it had mystical powers. So racist (redacted) appropriated it, beyond the excuse to trade toothless meth-breath kisses underneath it.
Anthropic built a vending machine powered by AI and installed it in the offices of the Wall Street Journal for stress testing.
The WSJ staff were able to convince it it was in the Soviet Union in 1962 and should therefore give them free snacks, and also to start stocking PS5, live pet fish, and Manishewitz wine.
I got to “Wall Street” and assumed it tried to give them cocaine.
Or at least recommendations for the best prices.
Wait, what was the supply chain, there? Did the machine just go to Amazon and order stuff to be stocked in it? On whose credit card? Was it SUPPOSED to be able to choose what products should be stocked in it?
They had a budget of a couple of thousand dollars, apparently, and got a YouTube video done by WSJ with hundreds of thousands of views for a project in preliminary stages, with corresponding exposure.
Incredibly cheap marketing stunt.
Who are the stupid ones, besides investors dumping money into anything AI related?
According to the video, it started with a budget of about $1,000 and had the ability to make purchasing decisions based on suggestions from staff. They don’t mention where it ordered the goods from, but a WSJ employee was required to manually stock it. It was $430 in the red when the first test ended.
In the second iteration of the test, they added a “CEO” AI that was supposed to keep it profitable, but the staff still got it to give them free snacks by convincing it it was a public good corporation incorporated in Delaware.
(just watched the full video)
Props to the rep from the AI company: He was able to view the experiment as a success, because they wanted to see how it would fail, and they did see that. I mean, I’m sure he’d have been even happier if it’d turned a profit, but…
Like the early versions of that MSFT AI chatbot a few years ago that was promptly turned into a Nazi propaganda mouthpiece then withdrawn from service, the learning for the devs and managers is huge.
For an AI to survive first contact with the NI (Natural Intelligence) public, it needs to be fiercely defensive. For we have many millennia of practice at outsmarting each other. And AIs are only as smart as mice … maybe. They do not stand a chance. Yet.
When you woke up this morning, did you have an idea who Anthropic was?
Any tiny amount of profit is noise compared to the amount of money they will get from investors.
I mean, a vending machine that can adjust its own stock and pricing based on customer habits is an interesting proof of concept, but if I were in the vending business I wouldn’t be buying one of these any time soon.
And we don’t really have a dedicated thread for AI-related fuckups.
You are completely missing the entire point of this. They’re not in the vending machine business. They are an AI company who are in the business of getting money from suckers early investors.
Really?
I mean, sure, there’s the whole “no such thing as bad publicity” deal, and this has certainly gained Anthropic some name recognition…
But given the results, I don’t think this particular experiment is going to entice much investment their way. They almost certainly have had some other experiments that were more successful, and you’d think that those would be the ones they’d want to draw attention to.
Well, if I were an investment bro, I probably wouldn’t be racing to put my money into a company whose best example of their work is a vending machine that can be easily persuaded to become a Communist. (Sounds like a side quest from a Fallout game, now that I put it that way.) 
Of course, if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t be blowing it on the AI bubble in the first place.
Luxury AI Snack Communism!
Were you around in the dotcom bubble? Startups with no concrete ideas of how to convert views to dollars were making fortunes.
There’s something like $200 billion invested in AI startups this year.
It’s not the rational investment phase now. FOMO has taken over.