AI, Intimacy, and Transcendence

For decades, the tech industry has distilled rich, real-world experiences into quantifiable data—clicks, views, and time spent—which are then neatly categorized into rows and columns so that interactions can be used for profit. This approach has undoubtedly boosted the economy but at the cost of stripping the context and meaning from our online behaviors. Machines can store every transaction, yet they fail to capture the 'why' behind our actions. Why choose a song? Sometimes it's about mood or company, or even to block out an earworm from a morning commute. These nuances matter because they represent the true value of our experiences.

Context is everything—whom you're with, where you're going, and why. Machines currently lack the ability to understand this context, but generative AI, especially modern large language models, hold the promise of changing this limitation. These models can process vast amounts of unstructured data, potentially capturing some semblance of the human context embedded within. How effectively they can recreate or understand our context remains to be seen, but the potential is certainly profound.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Dave, these AI systems would have to know a lot about us—do we really want some machine poking around in our private lives?" And I get it, I do. The idea of an AI that knows me intimately—perhaps even better than my friends & family—is unnerving.

But hear me out. What if, instead of just trying to sell us more stuff or keep us glued to our screens, these AI systems actually helped us understand ourselves better? What if they could nudge us towards being more mindful, more self-aware, more in tune with what really matters to us? What if AI could help us understand ourselves and our world in new and profound ways. What if AI didn’t just cater to our immediate desires, but challenged us to grow and develop as individuals and as a society.

I’m not proposing that this is easy technology to create nor that tech companies will be financially incentivized to create it. But I am proposing that it might be possible. It might be possible for technology to offer a deeper, more intimate understanding of ourselves and our experiences—all through a new capability to absorb and understand the complex context of our lives.

To illustrate, let me share a personal story about a recent family trip to New Zealand. Current technology could track our plane tickets, hotel bookings, and car rentals, but it couldn't grasp the essence of our journey—the planning, the personal interactions, the spontaneous decisions. This trip involved much more than just transactions; it was about connections, health issues on the road, and adapting plans on the fly.

Imagine a future where AI could play a role in each aspect of such a journey, not just by tracking transactions but by understanding and enhancing our real-world experiences. It might participate in the early conversations through text and email about where we might want to go. It might learn from those conversations to help craft a unique itinerary that blends our individual needs and desires. It might help us capture special memories and communicate them with others. And it might help us navigate the social challenges and opportunities of traveling with a group that had never traveled together before.

Yes, it is most likely that Big Tech will want to use these new intimate understandings of each of us to sell us more things or tell us what we want to hear—extending the negative side of current tech and social media. And yes, you could choose to take the route of optimizing yourself—an extended quantified self—but you might also choose suboptimal and trust that new meaning might be found in the interstitial space between what you want and what you didn't know was possible.

The future hasn’t arrived yet so we can dream of many alternatives.

Our dream is to design AI to be a Mind for our Minds—our riff on Steve Job’s metaphor that a computer is a bicycle for our minds. The shift to modern AI means that our computers are no longer just tools we control—they increasingly have to understand, to reason, and make decisions on our behalf. But if these machines will become metaphorical “minds,” we need to decide how much we want them to be minds “for us.”

Our dream is that AI can work for us through a collaborative relationship where AI understands and even anticipates our needs through a deep grasp of our complex context. Our dream is that AI might help us transcend the mundane and experience life more fully.

This dream has three parts:

Metacognitive AI: The most accessible application of AI today is in enhancing our metacognition—our ability to think about our own thinking. This involves AI systems helping us to assess our knowledge state, identify gaps, and understand our own cognitive processes. For instance, an AI could remind you of your previous reactions in similar situations or help prepare you for upcoming challenges based on past behavior.

Mindful AI: The next step is for AI to assist in mindfulness—helping us become more aware of our emotions, the people around us, and our environment. On our trip to New Zealand, for example, changes in our itinerary were influenced by both reading a history book and a newfound interest in local botany. Imagine an AI that could suggest activities based on what it understands about your current mood and interests, enhancing your engagement with the world around you.

Meaningful AI: Perhaps the most ambitious and profound aspect is AI's potential to lead us towards a more meaningful life. This goes beyond making recommendations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement or profit. Instead, it involves creating choices that resonate deeply with our personal values and aspirations. AI that can help us discover emergent values. It's about AI that understands what makes us tick, not just as consumers, but as human beings seeking authenticity and purpose in our lives.

Of course, this is a dream that faces plenty of headwinds. But if we can get it right, if we can create AI that truly understands and supports our authentic selves, I think it might be an AI I would want because it might help me lead a richer, more meaningful life. It might prompt me to question my assumptions, to consider alternative perspectives, to grapple with the big questions of life and meaning that we so often neglect in the busyness of our daily lives.

So here's to dreaming of AI that might help us lead richer, more meaningful lives. May the future of tech be less about clicks and more about context. Less about data and more about depth. And may it always remember that, no matter how smart it gets, it's still dealing with a bunch of messy, complex, beautifully flawed humans.