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> In a rare moment of humanity, one of your friends calls you. AI knows all about your friends and their recent events so had already summarized talking points. In case you can't be bothered, AI will carry out the actual conversation, it's trained in your voice

I love this thought. Why not go further, have AI reach out to my friends and ask them about things they (or their AIs) recently told "me" about?

Soon our AIs will carry on our social lives and we'll just lie in the dark with tubes in us. We become the computers, and the computers become us, and the robots have finally won.

> I love this thought. Why not go further, have AI reach out to my friends and ask them about things they (or their AIs) recently told "me" about?

We already have this. Secretaries. Automated Happy Birthday emails.

When I was in a sales engineering role our sales team had a admin assistant who would sent out follow-ups, check-ins, and other correspondence (e.g. customer made a big public release, so congratulate them, etc.).

This is just another example of robots takin ur jerbs, basically.

Yep, our AI voice equivalents could maintain friendships with each other in which case the "what is the point?" question applies. Or, you might reach out for real but fail to be sure if you're talking to your real friend or not.

Or how about this interesting second-order effect: email. Soon Office will include advanced AI capabilities to write and reply to email.

What is the point of me reading it? If my AI can generate a satisfactory reply, your AI could have generated the response too. No email needed, nor a reply.

We're now in a phase where anybody can generate spectacular art. What is the point of me looking at your generated art? AI can generate personalized art based on what it knows I like.

If AI works, and it's headed that way, you keep ending up at the same question: what is the point of anything?

As counter force, there's significant room for a new low tech hippie Luddite movement.

> Soon Office will include advanced AI capabilities to write and reply to email. What is the point of me reading it? If my AI can generate a satisfactory reply, your AI could have generated the response too. No email needed, nor a reply.

You'd be kind of daft not to proof-read the emails your AI sends out on your behalf. who knows what you might unknowingly agree to do?

> We're now in a phase where anybody can generate spectacular art. What is the point of me looking at your generated art? AI can generate personalized art based on what it knows I like. If AI works, and it's headed that way, you keep ending up at the same question: what is the point of anything?

there is no point to anything, there wasn't before AI and there isn't now. anything we do is meaningless, because eventually we all die, and our efforts are ultimately forgotten. once you get over that you can make your peace with whether the pretty thing you look at is made by a human feeding sentences to a computer or a human carefully marking paper with a pencil, or some combo.

but seriously, as a human who has spent all of my life doodling, drawing, illustrating, painting, thousands of hours creating my own art, and even building my own tools to do so, I find AI is just another tool in the box. I can use it to make images, and now someone who has not spent most of their life drawing can use it to make something more visually stunning than I ever could. has it rendered my efforts meaningless? hell no, I enjoyed every second I spent drawing. I still draw. but I don't harbour any illusions that I'm doing it for anyone other than myself.

Regarding the email example, you're reasoning from the current state of AI whilst I was looking at its future state where it's close to flawless.

The bigger point was that sending AI content to each other is utterly pointless. The generate->send->read->generate reply->send cycle would simply be: generate.

Example: you send me an email asking about a project's status as well as the contact person for a particular vendor the company deals with. I'll manually reply with the answer, or let AI generate it (fully or partly) and send it back to you. Great. In the future state, your AI will simply give you the answers directly. You won't email me and you don't need me.

My take on the meaning of life is that there isn't any, it's whatever you make of it. But I wasn't being that deep. I believe that our current still human approach has substantially more meaning than AI generating almost anything.

I'm happy that you enjoy the process of art-making itself, that's a robust baseline to fall back on, but joy in process applies to very few interactions. My point is that many if not all digital interactions become pointless.

> In the future state, your AI will simply give you the answers directly. You won't email me and you don't need me.

that sounds great. you emailing me about a project and waiting for me to write an email to you is an inefficient waste of both of our time, and if AI can give us that time back, it should.

> My point is that many if not all digital interactions become pointless.

but I disagree that it will render all digital interactions pointless - just the day to day drudgery.

20 years ago, if you wanted to find out the opening times of a store you had to call them up or walk to the door. now, you can google it in seconds. we have done away with a lot of the short phone conversations, and our lives are better for it. but we still talk on the phone. the conversations are more meaningful and less redundant.

We gave up our humanity when we came down from the trees, then again when we started cooking our food, then again when we made up languages, started writing, reading, and counting... the list goes on. Whatever "our humanity" is, we don't seem to be the worse for having lost it and made up a new one over and over. Each time might be the last, but so far we've done well.

"done well"? At best isn't the jury out on that one pending what is left after we've handled climate change?

So far we've done well. We may annihilate a big chunk of life on the planet in a nuclear apocalypse tomorrow, but up to today we're ok. It's too early to tell what comes next.

If we're going to penalize humanity for climate change we might as well give points to humanity for becoming capable of diverting asteroids or curing multi-species plagues too.

> We may annihilate a big chunk of life on the planet in a nuclear apocalypse tomorrow, but up to today we're ok.

UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’( https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur... ).

UN climate report: Scientists release 'survival guide' to avert climate disaster (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65000182)

Sorry, not seeing doing ok.

Climate change is horrible and will change life on Earth for the worst for all forms of life, including humans. But given the choice between (a) no industrial revolution and no climate change, and (b) industrial revolution and climate change, I'm picking (b) every time and it isn't even close.

In the 21st century, why is it necessary for one or the other? There are solutions that don't involve destroying our home.

Remote work brings people together. Instead of being in an office with colleagues, I'm in the same space with my significant other, and what used to be smoke breaks are now sex breaks. The time I used to waste on commute I now use to meet with friends and acquaintances.

Some people are so devoid of life that they think the formality of an office is what counts as friendship.

If my colleague calls me at least two times a day that means they like me and we're friends

They like you so much they want you to stop seeing your family and return to office so you can provide emotional support and water cooler chats.

I mean I agree for my life but only because I already built up my social circle from these shared spaces. What's someone fresh out of school in a new city supposed to do in 20 years?

Go to bars, clubs, hobbies centers, on tinder dates, to sport games, to friends house parties, to theaters, to restoraunts, to parks, to museums, to wine tastings, to internet forums and world of Warcraft guilds, to Facebook groups, to irc chats, to mailing lists.

Putting your responsibility to find social relationships off on your job is pathetic.

"The time I used to waste on commute I now use to meet with friends and acquaintances."

I hope this is true, same for the sex breaks, but I'm skeptical. So on any given work day, you physically meet with friends between 7-9AM and/or 5-7 Pm? Like, every day?

These "friends" of yours, they have nowhere to go? Or do you sneak this into your work day and just randomly disappear for any length of time, which is something most of us can't do?

I was talking about total amount of hours, not the same exact hours as a typical commutes.

"In a rare moment of humanity, one of your friends calls you. AI knows all about your friends and their recent events so had already summarized talking points. In case you can't be bothered, AI will carry out the actual conversation, it's trained in your voice."

This is the premise of an episode of Silicon Valley where Guilfoyle trains an AI to act as his chat agent surrogate based on his historical transcripts, and then his colleague creates another one and they end up just conversing with each other.

South Park did it last week.

We’re slowly opting into the matrix.