Would you let AI rep you in a meeting?

The rise of Grid Zero has prompted Meta to turn its focus to DMs, and one of their new features is an AI assistant to “help” send messages. It’s a horrifying concept to me. The app already mediates our existence, reducing it to branding, professionalism, activism or some combination of those three. One of the few pleasures left are the semi-private... See more

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.

But we still think somehow that meeting virtually can’t be as good as meeting physically, but I actually believe that the virtual meeting might even supersede the physical meeting in the future and we will have even better experiences virtually than we are having physically, which is kind of insane to think.

That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but hasn’t really asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is t... See more

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