- Maybe trying to engineer addiction is what should be illegal, and if you want to question "how do you define whether something is addictive" you don't need an objective measure: you determine whether it seems like the people making the product seem to think that's their goal.
- I would argue that intent should not even matter. Whatever punishment/consequences are deemed appropriate, they should apply based on the system's actual exploitation of addictive tendencies in humans. Otherwise you're just incentivizing people to get better at covering their tracks.
- This applies to any business that wants a repeat customer.
- You’re implying there’s no distinction between addiction and use. And I think you’re excessive cynicism is just wrong in practical ways,
I always buy my nails from Home Depot. I’m not addicted to nails. Home Depot does not reasonably think they can get me addicted to nails.
- You are right! We should regulate all businesses the same way.
- "you know it when you see it"
- I guess I worded that poorly; it isn't merely that we don't need an objective measure: we literally don't need a measure at all, as the crime would be attempting to cause it, whether or not it was even possible to do, and so we simply do not care if the activity was addictive. If you are going out of your way to exploit the psychology or physiology of other humans in an attempt to use that to sell your product, maybe that is what should be illegal.
This would then mean that "our expert witness has strong evidence that my client's product area is not 'addictive', so my client could not ever be said to be engineering addiction" would not be a defense any more than "the plan my client came up with to kill their alleged victim could not possibly have worked, so my client can not be charged with attempted murder" is (at least generally, afaik) not a defense.
- This just shifts the question to: what counts as attempt to cause an addiction?
Does writing a book aims to make people read addictive? Try to design a gym class that makes you feel good about yourself so you will come again?
You still need to define what is addictive
- Ok, fair, so, to try to apply this to my analogous crime: I would agree that attempted murder does need a definition of "murder"; but, the crime does not care whether your specific plan would have led to an act of murder, only whether or not the defendant was trying to murder.
We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?
- The above phrasing, an attempt to "exploit the psychology or physiology of others", works fine. It's a form of fraud, or scamming. Is an attempted scam a crime? I guess probably not, oh well.
I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.
It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.
※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".
- Shockingly, a huge amount of human behavior cannot be strictly defined and is best evaluated with situational, subjective judgement. Crazy.
- This why have the "reasonable person", a legal fiction.
- More demonstrating intent
- Step 1: make copilot in window actually useful.
- Literally every company on the planet would jump at the chance for their product to be addictive.
- No that’s just the goal of bad companies. I work for a company that does not, in fact, want our product to be addictive. We want our product to help people. Stop normalizing this behavior as ‘just business’ and start calling out bad people for what they are.
- Name and praise?
- Yeah but you’re not supposed to say it out loud. The bigger part of this story is Nadella saying (paraphrased) that he has no clue who wrote the document and that guy should look for a new job.
- Who'd've guessed that the profit motive being the primary if not sole concern would sometimes (often) create incentives that are hostile to humanity.
- Imagine a world where every car company would get money every time someone uses their car.
Instead of monthly subscription for self driving or heated seat, it would just cost a few cents a minute.
This would be a strong push to try to destroy public transportation everywhere
- >Imagine a world where every car company would get money every time someone uses their car.
So oil companies? Moreover car companies do get more money with more car use. More driving means more parts required, more servicing needed (from their dealership network), and cars that need to be replaced sooner. It's not as instantaneous as uber charging your card every time you do a ride, but I don't see how that makes a material difference.
- They don't get everything, spare parts are made by other companies, same with tires, servicing can be done outside their network...
Microsoft handles more verticality.
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- I don't think that's actually true. Heck, from my own experience, I can definitively say it's not actually true. I've worked in several organizations where I helped create and sell products whose job was to provide value, then let people get on with their day. I wouldn't have worked at those places otherwise.
Not saying that intended addictiveness is not common, but let's not normalize corporate sociopathy.
- That's because your employer doesn't think they can ever be addictive.
- No, it was because they weren't supposed to be. They were fulfilling an actual need and creating value in a way that wasn't intended to be addictive. And I was a co-founder of some of those orgs and products, so it wasn't about my employer.
I know it's hard to believe that not every organization is sociopathic, because many are (the larger, the more likely to be). But not every one is.
- I think the most disturbing aspect of HN is how so many people seem to believe that anti-social behavior is rational. There is this weird dichotomy that you are either a money hungry behemoth or destitute out on the street. My company is a not-for-profit, we put our revenue back into the local community, our employees make a great living and we still have year over year growth.
- Evidence that anti-social behavior is rational can be seen in all the successful anti-social people, like Elon, Donald, Jeffrey and William.
- Well they just achieved the opposite of that with github copilot, congrats
- Copilot, I want you to find product market fit, don't return an answer until you have found it.
- There are some good books on how to make products addictive, like Hooked. What's funny is the author, I guess, got backlash or had remorse writing that book so he put out another book called Indistractable but it's plainly obvious that you as a user would not be able to compete against legions of psychiatrists in these companies whose goal, day in and day out, is to addict you.
- I'm not sure what the smoking gun is here. Usefulness and dependence are mostly interchangeable. I'm "addicted" to computers, indoor plumbing, headphones, entertainment, etc.
The crime here seems to be that they used a wrong word - would it have been better if they used "snackable", "irresistible", "enthusiast", or "binge-worthy"?
- There are plenty reasons to be critical of Microsoft's AI strategy and tactics (and especially of many other things MS has done), but the linked article seems to be targeted at gamer, rather than at people who care about non-gaming tech industry or public policy.
What seemed a bit more relevant was one of the linked 404 articles, concerning CEO's denial and attempts to dismiss the document, before the document was revealed to be co-authored by the head of the strategic project. But even that article sounds more like social media or political mud-slinging in style, rather than journalism:
> In attempting to distance himself from his own company’s executives and strategy documents, Nadella has revealed that he either does not know how to read or does not know what is happening with some of the company’s highest-profile products.
But what I didn't see what a smoking gun that they were truly looking for addictive (like, say, Facebook/Meta has been caught engineering) rather than something they could've described as essential if they weren't using amped-up business bro language. So rage-baiting over the word "addictive" seems to be missing better questions.
- They haven't been doing a very good job. Maybe they asked "CoPilot, please make our AI products like a drug", but it misunderstood and instead of making them addictive like cocaine, it made them uncomfortable to use like a laxative.
- That’s probably why they pushed out Phil Spencer and handed over the Xbox division to a very pro-AI employee.
- To be fair, the fundamentals that pre-2019 Xbox (and all other consumer gaming) relies on were already slowly going away and have recently been confirmed to have an extremely tiny chance of recovery, if at all. Embracing the pivot to gambling and tobacco-style customer retention philosophies is purely an effort to salvage the sunk costs in an industry whose traditional customer base is being forced to shrink and input costs are being forced to rise by largely macroeconomic headwinds.
- What fundamentals are those?
- The console market is shrinking and video games are becoming synonymous with PC gaming ( and handhelds I guess but Xbox isn't doing handhelds I think)
- Xbox has handhelds, but they're made by partners and are more about streaming games. Example: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/handhelds/rog-xbox-ally
- So... that's pretty disgusting. Why are these AI evangelists so gross? It's a useful technology... It's only the Simpsons-Monorail sales pitch that makes it feel icky.
- So their "humanistic" approach is just marketing, huge surprise /s
- [flagged]
- You should be less racist and xenophobic
- What does his status as a foreigner have to do with ruining Windows? You can't think of any homegrown American CEOs that systematically ruin their products and companies?
- kotaku? Really?
- The source site (404 Media) requires a login to read their article. Kotaku's coverage is plainly readable.
- Good on Nadella: After expressing his complete disbelief that such a document could have been written, Nadella adds that the elusive and mysterious authors “may want to go work elsewhere.”
edit: VP of a product I had not even heard of; it's no Copilot. I would not assume it was on Nadella's radar.
- The author is his vice president of Microsoft Scout, "with AI assistance, but fully reviewed" as has been reported elsewhere.
He's blatantly pretending not to know
