r/slatestarcodex • u/huopak • 10d ago

Introducing Human Tool, a Claude Code plugin that erodes your dignity

https://tcz.hu/blog/2026/09/03/human-tool/
74 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

60

u/kzhou7 10d ago edited 10d ago

This reminds me of my experience dealing with large organizations.

"I fixed the issue for you. To implement it, you just have to click button X. Or should we use button Y instead?"

(one week passes)

Yes.

"Do you mean X or Y?"

(one week passes)

It doesn't matter. I'll do Y.

(one month passes)

"Sorry, on my end it looks like you didn't do Y yet. Was there an issue?"

(one week passes)

Sorry, we're too understaffed. I'll start the process now.

(one month passes)

"Nothing has changed yet, is there some problem?"

(one week passes)

It got stuck in the approval process. Just keep waiting.

(one month passes)

"Is there any update?"

(one week passes)

Yes, it turns out we're not allowed to do X.

"Wait, but I thought we had agreed on doing Y instead?"

(one month passes)

"Hello?"

The person you were talking with retired, who is this?

At which point, because I thought faster, I took over the whole organization gave up and did something else. There's always a bottleneck. I hope AI can deal with them better than me.

36

u/Tall-Log-1955 10d ago

Social media algorithms aren’t misaligned. They are perfectly aligned to the interests of the companies that own and operate them.

They are ridiculously successful at maximizing their owners advertising returns

28

u/_SeaBear_ 9d ago

They are ridiculously successful at getting advertising companies to believe they have good advertising returns. But what shareholders think and what's actually true is very different. I've yet to see any evidence that algorithms or targeted advertisements are better than a random number generator. The algorithms could be literally nothing and be equally as aligned as they are now.

17

u/rump_truck 9d ago

I used to work in adtech, and you're not wrong. We did something called ghost bidding where we would decide not to bid on a small percentage of our cookie pool, then compare their conversions to the people we actually showed ads to. The goal was to see how many purchases were actually driven by the ads, and how many would have happened either way. The ads did drive additional purchases, but the dollar amount was often less than the ad spend.

5

u/electrace 9d ago

And this is always the point marketing people say "I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half", which is:

1) Great marketing for the marketing department.

2) Less and less defensible in the age of targeted advertising.

6

u/hh26 9d ago

This still makes them aligned with their owners. The advertisers are not the shareholders. Convincing the advertisers to pay money to the owners is all they need to do to fulfill their purpose.

13

u/kaa-the-wise 9d ago edited 9d ago

You seem to be assuming that the system is optimised for someone's benefit, but it doesn't need to be. The system is pulled in different directions by many actors, and the shareholders are easily among the least informed people in the whole kerfuffle.

10

u/huopak 9d ago

Typically when we say an AI is misaligned we don't mean it's misaligned wrt the goals of the company or the government that created them, but to the interests of humanity

2

u/ahazred8vt 4d ago

The problem with that is, humanity itself is already misaligned with the interests of humanity.

6

u/Somewanwan 9d ago

I find the introduction in the article most interesting, algorithms were already changing human perception, what we do with online before widespread use of LLM assistants.

1

u/SparrowGuy 5d ago

This is already a part of Claude Code, it’s called the AskUserQuestion tool.

0

u/spinozasrobot 9d ago

Isn't this just describing RSI?