Prepare for That Stupid World
30 comments
·December 19, 2025derektank
I’m curious, has the author seen or read any of Joanna Stern’s other reporting before? Her stories are often silly frames that explore the experience of using consumer technology. She’s not an aggressive industry reporter, her purpose is to explain or reveal what the user experience of new technology is, often for an unsophisticated audience. See for example her story about using conversational chatbots while out camping[1] or how to use tech to unplug from tech[2]. This seems like a perfectly fine niche for a writer and the vending machine story is of a piece with her past work.
zkmon
Prepare for That Stupid World - is actually a very sober advice. Looking at the past few decades, it is easy to see that with each tech innovation, the world only got stupider, childish and lazier.
gdulli
My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.
I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.
Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.
Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.
jonasenordin
Tell it to "always when I search for quoted text, pretend you're the Galaxy S20 gallery app"
armchairhacker
Can you search for “the word ‘wife’”?
stronglikedan
> the world only got stupider, childish and lazier
Humans do trend toward their natural state, and technology accelerates the trend.
jcstk
Any information that comes to you for free or is on a screen is an advertisement. All of it. That's the point. Do you think people spend millions and billions of dollars creating and maintaining a content delivery network because they just want you to know about things?
deadbabe
What if people could pay to read an advertisement?
peacebeard
These people probably know better, but also know that if they don't adhere to the narrative of their employers, they'll be seen as rabble rousers and be in for a world of hurt.
valleyer
> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.
I fear the author has missed the point of the "Project Vend" experiments, the original write-ups of which are available here (and are, IMO, pretty level-headed about the whole thing):
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2
The former contains a section titled "Why did you have an LLM run a small business?" that attempts to explain the motivation behind the experiment.
ipdashc
Yeah, I haven't read the WSJ article, but I did read the original Anthropic experiment and I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here. This is effectively just something they did for fun. It's entertaining and a funny read. Not everything has to be the end of the world.
rdiddly
The point is that it's an ad. No company spends money on a joke just to make a joke. Not the end of the world, although it's interesting that all the end of the world stuff comes directly out of that joke and its universe as it were. Take the joke seriously and extend its logic as far as it will go, and you get the end of the world. It's a thought experiment, or that's how I read it anyway.
ipdashc
> The point is that it's an ad.
Sure, but like the other guy said, that's the point of publicity stunts. It doesn't even have to be specific to a company/ad, any silly thing like this is going to sound crazy if you take it seriously and "extend its logic as far as it will go". Like seeing the Sony bouncy balls rolling down the street ad and going "holy shit, these TV companies are going to ruin the world by dropping bouncy balls on all of us". It's a valid thought experiment, but kind of a strange thing to focus on so sternly when it's clearly not taking itself seriously, especially compared to all the real-world concerning uses of AI.
(And it is pretty funny, too. If anything I think we'd all prefer more creative ads like this and the bouncy ball one, and less AI-generated doomer Coke ads or such.)
chuckadams
I think the phrase we're looking for is "publicity stunt". Seems a fairly harmless and self-effacing one at that.
sschnei8
To be fair they could have done an experiment on a transaction that typically requires a person in the loop. Rather than choosing a vending machine which, already, does not require a person in the loop for the transaction.
ipdashc
If I recall, the idea was the AI taking the role of the vending machine manager, choosing and restocking products and such. Anything on top of that was, I assume, just added for fun.
welferkj
>I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here.
I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.
AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?
sudhirb
The partner for these projects has a benchmark that the top frontier LLM labs seem to be running on their new model releases - I think there's _some_ value to these numbers in helping people compare and contrast model performance.
brador
It was always tasks reaching obsolescence, but now it’s the human organism. But the human as a unit is the only known conscious being in the universe, the only entity capable of generating meaningful goals (even if only to them) not related to the 4fs.
Humans were just not needed anymore, and it terrifies.
Shalomboy
The author hints at this idea with their title and their closing remarks, but it feels like the folks selling LLM services are selling insurance to white collar workers. I wish they had expanded on this observation more, rather than harp on the WSJ puff piece for being silly.
littlecranky67
I had recently contact the official support email (support@bunq.com) of Bunq - a Neobank (like N26 and Revolut). Because they notified me that they changed their T&C and I never really used the account after the kyc (because they rejected my tax filings), I figured I let them know that I do not agree to the new T&C and want to terminate my account and have my data deleted.
Since the T&C update came - of course - from no-reply@bunq.com I went to their website and quickly found out, unless I install their App again, there is no way to do anything. After installing the App, they wanted me to record a selfie, because I was using the app from a new device. I figured that is a lot of work and mostly somewhat unreasonable to record a new selfie just to have my data deleted - so I found their support@bunq.com address.
And, of course, you guessed it, it is 100% a pure AI agent at borderline retard level. Even though it is email, you get AI answers back. My initial inquiry that I decline the T&C and want to terminate my account and my data deleted via GDPR request was answered with a completely hallucinated link: bunq.com/dataprotection which resulted in immediate 404. I replied to that email that it is a 404, and the answer was pretty generic and that - as well as all responses seem to be answered in 5 minutes - made me suspect it is AI. I asked it what 5 plus five 5 is, and yes, I got a swift response with the correct answer. My question which AI version and LLM was cleverly rejected. Needless to say, it was completely impossible to get anything done with that agent. Because I CC'ed their privacy officer (privacy@bunq.com) I did get a response a day later asking me basically for everything again that I had answered to the AI agent.
Now, I never had any money in that account so I don't care much. But I can hardly see trusting a single buck to a bank that would offer that experience.
kittikitti
This is a great take and one that I align with when it comes to the AI vending machine experiment. Journalism in English has become a mouthpiece for fascist leaders and corporations, nothing more. Places like The New York Times have incredible gaps in their journalism at the price of increasing shareholder value.
jeffbee
It's a pretty solid point, except that the credulity of the journalist is not in contrast to their "world-class" status. They are a gadget reviewer.
barfoure
It’s a milquetoast rant but I got nothing - the employee is right. You should prepare for the world and stop acting so shocked. You had decades to call out journalists for being paid mouthpieces but you didn’t because they spewed nonsense that you agreed with and benefitted you.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Prepare for what happens next. FAFO.
rdiddly
Yes, that's how I solve all problems. I can't do anything now, because I didn't do anything before. It's my rule of thumb. Never start doing things!
dkdcio
I also enjoy the implication everyone has had decades to do something about journalism —- I’ve barely been an adult for a decade, my bad I guess!
barfoure
My bad, I should have been more clear: tech journalists have always been paid shills.
lo_zamoyski
Ressentiment is like this. Steeped in envy and vindictiveness, rather than looking for ways to save the situation, it wills the destruction of others.
It has always exited, but its overt forms are very much in vogue today and even celebrated publicly.
everdrive
>You had decades to call out journalists
If only I could get any journalists or companies to actually listen to me.
A part of me wants to be dismissive of this blog post
1) because dude, it’s the Wall Street Journal; the entire episode should be viewed as Anthropic preparing to Ollie into an IPO next year.
2) I’m starting to interpret a lot of blog posts like these as rage bait
But I do get the point that the author is trying to make.
I just wish that there were some perspectives on the subject as a whole (AI’s sloptrod into every crevice of human life; modern technology and society and general) that don’t terminate on ironic despair.