A possible AI future

Persistent, connected and kind.

Most visions of the internet in 1995 were about individuals interacting with content online. It turns out that the internet (inter plus net) is actually about connection. The apps and businesses that were most successful connected people–to ideas, to things or mostly, to each other.

The current range of AI feels like content creation. You can have an AI write your high school essay, draw you a picture or invent a recipe.

But perhaps history will repeat itself. Perhaps developers will realize that persistent knowledge of what came before and who needs help and connection is the next frontier.

(Alas, history may also repeat itself when venture backed companies build networks that are seductive and sticky, and then, once we depend on them, will intentionally make them worse to earn more profit–but perhaps we can, forewarned, guard against this).

We’re not far from many people spending their entire day with Bluetooth earbuds on, particularly as augmented reality gives us information audibly. And of course, if our ears are connected, the system knows what we’re saying and hearing.

We’re already living in a world where much of what we say and do is intermediated by our phones and keyboards. Again, the system knows.

So… what happens when the AI in our lives begins acting like a thoughtful, patient and trusted friend? Not just like the AI in the movie Her, but more focused on our networks and connections. Who’s trustworthy, talented, available or in need… It knows what’s happening now, but also what happened yesterday. Not just to us, but to those in our circle and the people they know as well…

You’re about to throw out an old board game from the attic. The AI whispers, “Hold a sec, I think a neighbor down the street has been looking for something just like that–want me to sell it to him?”

A company seeking RFPs invites all its suppliers to submit confidential overviews of their supply chain. An AI reads the material and creates Pareto optimal connections, building a confederation of several suppliers who can work together to build something faster and more efficiently than any could do alone.

Your fridge knows you love organic strawberries, and organizes 100 neighbors to buy a farmer’s entire crop, reducing waste and risk and cutting costs for everyone.

Three people are leaving a conference and they’re all calling a car to take them to the airport. Perhaps the AI offers a carpool.

We’re headed off to a community meeting, and we let the AI know that if someone there is hiring for the kind of job we’re good at, we’re open to a connection.

This is a level of intimacy, attention sharing and data that dwarfs anything that has come before, and it brings with it huge issues of permission, control and privacy.

I can think of a thousand ways that this power could be misused, manipulated and go terribly wrong. I have also seen the internet go wrong too. But this is only the beginning of the AI age, and it might help to find a north star, a standard for what happens when the connection machine works for us, instead of against us.