I wanted to share an article from Anthropic that came out a couple of days ago. The essence is that the model was given a task to manage a vending machine, which it failed to do.

For me, there’s nothing surprising in this, despite all sorts of arguments in chats like “ shows a high level of reasoning, which means it makes decisions better than humans."

This doesn’t mean they can actually make decisions, it means they can imitate it.

Don’t consider me a Luddite, but AI in the form they exist in is an excellent tool compared to their absence. But I’m old enough not to naively believe in the next technological revolution, because at least three of them haven’t made the world an ideal place. And there’s one reason - people who make the world what it is.

First, the presence of microcomputers in everyone’s pocket. Scientists of past decades could only dream of this and said it would give a leap in technology development if everyone had access to this. The result - a pocket computer is needed to watch TikToks. I’m being ironic, of course, but few people do science on a phone, let’s admit it.

The second example is more striking and I watched its development with admiration. It was cloning. I read all the news I could reach then. Cloning technology could provide endless organs for transplantation and extend lives, at minimum, and at maximum open possibilities for colonizing other worlds (I’ll keep quiet about Mars colonization, the third technology on my list). There was certain progress, but regulators intervened, and it wasn’t the EU as with Apple AI or nuclear energy. It was the Catholic Church, which said that the question of clones’ souls remains unresolved, so research was stopped.

The world changes, but if you leave the metropolis, it becomes noticeable that in some places new technologies have changed processes but not the essence. I won’t name anything specific, but those who understood, understood. In general, life in a metropolis creates an illusion that the world is moving forward, but it’s more a feature of the location than global world development.

Returning to the original thought, I love sci-fi and would like to believe in AGI and other technological news, but we shouldn’t forget that we still live in a world of people, where everyone can play their “Kansas City Shuffle.”

And yes, here’s the link to the article about Claude and the vending machine.