alt Hacker NewsMy wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.
Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
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I just can’t see this ever being common. It sounds terrible. Imagine phoning a number, a person answers and you attempt to relay and negotiate a food delivery order through them, in what world is that better than browsing an app? We don’t have to imagine, this is what we used to do. It sucked and almost everyone stopped doing it in favour of browsing an app. It’s just a superior interface for that sort of thing, it’s already as good as it needs to be.
> My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".
(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)
This is common because there's probably some other, major time savings things that your wife is able to spend money on that lets her have a reliable stock of food that she can plan and prepare for her lunch.
>Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely.
Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.
You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.
> There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
Are you arguing against observed reality? People have not been using AI assistants to buy things. Remember all those smart devices they sold trying to do exactly that? None of them are being used that way.