Now it's all be sold off to ensure next quarter's numbers are up so the execs get their bonuses.
There was even a depressing conversation where we all figured most people are signficantly more boring to talk to than an LLM. Its fantastic if you have the luck to be surrounded by interesting people, but that is an extreme luxury i suspect.
What might it look like to lower the barriers to that kind of situation, to extend that extreme luxury to more people—ideally to anybody who decides they’d rather lead interesting lives-of-the-mind themselves?
(Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959090 [3 days ago / 469 / 212] )
AI as salonnière. It's not enough to get lots of interesting people in a room (as at a meetup). That merely gets you to "there are so many valuable conversations latent in this room... and basically none of them will happen".
Also beyond the room. AI as ambient conversational matchmaking serendipity, weaving connections - "btw, that person in line with you also loves foul-weather sailing".
Years back, I was expecting this to rapidly become a pervasive app category. I'm unclear on why it hasn't.
In interactive lecturing (clickers) with peer instruction, there's an idea that people log in with seat location, and based on who understands or is confused about what, and having a record of past interactions, the system optimizes the fruitfulness of each peer assignment pairing "Alice, turn and discuss this question with Bob sitting to your rear left".
It's not always socially permissible but I often approach others with the mindset 1) Is this person far more knowledgeable in some topic than I, or 2) Let's find an unusual quirk about them that I never would have expected. And it rarely disappoints.
Though he apparently did spend enough time at Murray Hill to meet his wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore ("Betty") Shannon.
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/voices/betty-shannon...>