Branching out from the discussions about the current state of AI agents vs. how they were imagined in the text from the recent podcast episode... I was glad to hear our hosts were on a similar thought-track when discussing the "send this draft to the rest of the group and let me know when they've read it" example regarding how programmers tend to parse the last bit as "let me know when the metrics indicate they scrolled to the end" (etc) whereas a human agent would parse it as "and follow up with them after a reasonable time to ask if they've read it or not." One thing that struck me was the number of times I've told a white lie in that kind of scenario. Yes, I read it! (No, I haven't, but I just pulled it up when you asked and I'm skimming it now before the meeting starts). Dishonesty with the metrics-mindset takes a different form. In simple forms, it's like terms of service pages which gate the "agree" button behind a scroll value... You scroll to the end to lie. But if the designers of those metrics were somehow able to perfect them (eye tracking? a quiz at the end?) then an AI agent could force a more accurate/truthful answer from you. All that to get to my point... Do we have a right to lie about this stuff? How important is it for us to be able to present less-than-truthful representations to other people even if the medium is via an AI agent? If we don't include this concern in our designs, are we facilitating a world of micro-surveillance of coworkers and friends?

Absolutely. An app that automatically sends read receipts is often wrong about whether I’ve read something. That’s a lie. If my AI is going to lie, I’d rather it be on my behalf. I don’t think I can even consider it my AI unless its lies are in my interest.

Totally agree with Tom — we have the right to lie. Feels relevant: https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/2020-02-13-against-cop-shit/

I think I'm reminded of this... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/02/18/lying-in-the-military-is-common-army-war-college-study-says/

this sort of invites a (dangerous?) conversation about the divide and similarities between a

lie

and a

falsehood

— wherein one sort of denotes a moral imperative and the other one doesn’t

Read receipts is a good example but maybe a bit too empirical. I agree that programmers love "real data" and mostly intend to create systems that claim to operate on that level. Makes me think about all the fuss about tracking usage vs. asking the user if they liked the product.

Revisiting this!

Do we have a right to lie about this stuff? How important is it for us to be able to present less-than-truthful representations to other people even if the medium is via an AI agent?

I've been thinking about systems that provide us the right to lie -- so far, the keenest example I think I've found is in games. Many games are built around at least some aspect of hidden information, and many games empower (invite?) players to lie about the current game state to other players. With a vague gesture, are there ways to construct systems that may lie where that lying is permissible, or made explicit?

I lie in email, Slack, status messages, filenames, code comments, wishlists… It could be the way I’m primed by this thread, but I feel like honesty-enforcing systems are exceptional. I can edit a file’s mtime to be older than its actual modification time! In my generation, people get pretty emotionally invested in the mechanisms we use to enforce immutable truth, like cryptography and DRM and the little switch that made floppies read-only. I wonder if that’s different for younger people since those controls are so much more commonplace now? Except floppies.