Would you let AI rep you in a meeting?

Will we become so accustomed to speaking with AIs that we begin to interrupt one another more often, or speak less patiently and more forcefully? I can see us having to remind each other, “Hey, I’m not an AI. Don’t talk to me like that.” There are bound to be social and cultural ripple effects.

I am generally pretty skeptical about this transition, in part because Zuckerberg keeps talking about it as a radical improvement in our sense of “presence” online. I think both the mass adoption of—and the frustrations we all feel about—Zoom has shown that there is still a massive amount of headroom left in terms of improving the quality of straig... See more

Humanity is waking up to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence, but we don’t yet understand our role. People talk about unexplainable AI when they should be more concerned about the unexplainable humans running the companies that develop the AI. (Hiya, Sam!) People worried about AI taking their jobs and taking control are comp... See more

In her TED talk, Karen imagined a world in which AI and machine learning helped to bring us humans deeper into the world of animals. She closed by asking us to imagine an orca giving a TED talk:

And maybe one day in a speculative future, instead of a human here on stage, maybe bioacoustics would enable an orca to give a TED talk.

Dan O’Connell, chief AI and strategy officer at the cloud communications company Dialpad, sees his current role—and the jobs of other AI-devoted C-suiters—as essentially transitional: They are there to shepherd their respective companies into a future where AI is ubiquitous enough that it no longer falls under the purview of just one exec.

“I actual... See more

None of this is to imply that human beings should repudiate the technologies that make us more efficient. We just have to recognize which needs greater quantity can meet, and which it cannot. For example, AI chatbots cannot meet the need for intimacy. LLMs cannot meet the need for creativity. AI-generated art cannot meet the need for aesthetic nour... See more

We could be facing a world in which AI-model interfaces are the new gatekeepers of knowledge, and people are prompting chatbots instead of reading encyclopedias

Individuals will be able to perform valuable knowledge work, even collaborative knowledge work, without exposing our physical appearances, as we increasingly work through multiplayer, web-based productivity and creative tools. Deepfake technology, allowing you to synthetically generate human-seeming video or audio, is increasingly commoditized. I a... See more