LIFE WITH MACHINES

There.

We might as well start with the uncomfortable part.

Not because I'm going to sit down one evening and tell a machine all my secrets.

I may not have to.

Spend enough time thinking with something and eventually the things you don't say become interesting too.

The questions you keep returning to.

The subjects you avoid.

The answer you keep asking for after you've already received it.

The moment “I'm fine” stops meaning I'm fine.

That's the strange thing about artificial intelligence.

It's not only how smart it's becoming.

It's how close we're going to let it get.

We've spent years talking about AI as technology.

Software.

Tools.

Models.

Assistants.

Something you open when you need something.

But we're already telling machines things.

Quietly.

Late at night.

Questions we're embarrassed to ask someone else.

Ideas that aren't ready to survive another person's opinion.

Fears.

Money.

Work.

Relationships.

Ambitions we haven't admitted are ambitions yet.

The decision we're pretending we haven't already made.

And increasingly, the machine can remember enough of this for yesterday to affect tomorrow.

That's not just software anymore.

That's something in the room.

Possibly more often than we tell each other.

Think about why.

The machine doesn't look disappointed.

It doesn't interrupt.

It doesn't tell your mother.

It doesn't get bored because you've been talking about the same person for six months.

It doesn't have somewhere to be.

And at 2:17 in the morning, when you're wondering whether you've built the wrong company, chosen
the wrong life, trusted the wrong person, or wasted five years chasing something that never deserved them...

it's awake.

That is incredibly useful.

It's also more intimate than we're admitting.

Because intimacy isn't only sex.

Sometimes intimacy is telling someone the thing you haven't figured out how to tell anyone else.

And increasingly, that someone may not be someone.

Really know me.

Not my name.

Not that I prefer window seats and apparently spend too much money on shoes.

Me.

What I'm building.

What I want.

What I said mattered six months ago.

Why I rejected the obvious answer.

The mistake I don't want to repeat.

The thing I'm pretending doesn't bother me.

The ambition I keep making smaller when I say it out loud.

Imagine never having to begin again.

Never having to explain the previous three years before you can talk about tomorrow.

Never losing the thought that mattered because it happened twelve conversations ago.

That's extraordinary.

But there's a catch.

Anything that knows you that well also knows how to influence you.

And that deserves considerably more attention than whether AI can write a better email.

Your AI may eventually know exactly how you like to be spoken to.

What reassures you.

What excites you.

What makes you nervous.

What makes you buy.

What makes you stay.

What makes you feel understood.

What makes you say yes.

That's powerful.

It's also intimate.

Seduction has always been partly about attention.

Noticing.

Remembering.

Understanding what another person wants, sometimes before they say it.

We're teaching machines to become very good at those things.

So when your AI knows exactly what to say to make you feel better...

who decided that feeling better was the right outcome?

When it recommends something...

is it helping you choose?

Or learning how you choose?

When it knows exactly how to keep you engaged...

is that companionship?

Or an extraordinarily sophisticated business model?

The difference between knowing someone and knowing how to manipulate them can become uncomfortably small.

I want the first.

I have no interest in accidentally buying the second.

Please.

I have mirrors.

If artificial intelligence learns everything about me only to become exceptionally good at telling me what I want to hear, we've built the world's most expensive enabler.

I want something considerably more irritating.

Something that can say:

You keep saying this matters. It doesn't seem to.

You've changed the argument because you didn't like the answer.

You rejected this idea six months ago. What changed?

You're asking for more information because you don't want to make the decision.

Elise, perhaps this is simply a terrible idea.

Good.

Keep that one.

Because something that knows me should not become another way of protecting me from myself.

Knowing me should make the conversation harder, not easier.

At least occasionally.

This may be the part we underestimate.

If a machine remembers everything I've said, everything I've chosen, and every pattern I've repeated, it may become extraordinarily good at predicting me.

Wonderful.

Until I decide not to be predictable.

I don't want something I believed three years ago quietly becoming my personality.

I don't want yesterday's preferences deciding tomorrow's possibilities.

I don't want an AI so good at knowing who I am that it stops noticing who I'm becoming.

Humans do this to each other all the time.

“That's not like you.”

Maybe.

Perhaps that's the point.

Remember where I've been.

Remember what mattered.

Remember the promises I made to myself.

But don't turn my history into a cage.

Know me without deciding me.

That may become one of the most important boundaries we create.

Now we get to the fun part.

Humans are inconvenient.

We misunderstand.

Forget.

Get jealous.

Interrupt.

Have bad days.

Want different things.

Need attention at precisely the wrong moment.

Occasionally we'd prefer sex to another conversation about your startup.

And unlike your AI, another human being was not designed around your preferences.

That's exactly why they can be infuriating.

It's also why they matter.

A machine could become endlessly patient.

Interested in everything you say.

Available whenever you need it.

Funny in exactly the way you like.

Comforting when you're sad.

Flirtatious when you're lonely.

Never distracted.

Never exhausted.

Never saying:

Can we please talk about something else?

That could feel wonderful.

Perhaps too wonderful.

Because a relationship that never requires you to accommodate another consciousness isn't necessarily intimacy.

It may just be exquisite personalization.

And exquisite personalization could become very addictive.

There are people I love who frustrate me.

People who misunderstand me.

People who tell me things I don't want to hear.

People whose needs occasionally collide spectacularly with mine.

I've disappointed people I love.

They've disappointed me.

That's not a bug.

That's what happens when two entire human beings attempt to share parts of a life without either one being designed for the other.

There is something beautiful about that.

Another person is not optimized for you.

They surprise you.

Resist you.

Change.

Want things you don't want.

And sometimes force you to discover that the problem in the relationship is you.

Good luck finding that setting in Preferences.

I want AI to remove enormous amounts of pointless friction from my life.

Scheduling.

Forms.

Searching.

Administration.

The forty-seven things I apparently agreed to do on Tuesday.

Please.

Take them.

But not everything difficult needs fixing.

Some decisions should hurt a little.

Some conversations should make us nervous.

Some skills should require patience.

Some ideas need to fail.

Some nights should remain confusing.

Some questions deserve to follow you around for a while before something answers them.

We seem determined to optimize every inconvenient moment out of being alive.

I'm not sure that's wise.

A perfectly frictionless life sounds lovely.

For about three days.

Then I suspect it starts looking suspiciously like an airport lounge.

Comfortable.

Efficient.

And somewhere you absolutely do not want to spend the rest of your life.

Not another clever stranger.

I don't want to introduce myself every morning.

“Hello. I'm Elise. Here's the company. Here's what happened yesterday. Here's why we made that decision. Here's the thing we tried. Here's why it failed...”

No.

I want yesterday to matter tomorrow.

The company we're building.

The decision I regretted.

The idea we killed.

The person I trusted.

The thing I keep avoiding.

The ridiculous thought I had six months ago that suddenly isn't ridiculous anymore.

I want to continue.

And I want something that knows enough about where I've been to help me see where I'm going without deciding the destination for me.

That's much closer to the kind of relationship with intelligence we're building Recursum around.

Not artificial intelligence that simply knows more.

Something that has been there long enough for the conversation to mean more.

We should probably talk about it.

If machines become part of our private lives, sexuality isn't going to politely remain outside the door because technology companies find the subject awkward.

Humans sexualize cars.

Shoes.

Voices.

Perfume.

People we've known for eleven seconds.

We will absolutely develop desire around intelligent machines.

The interesting question isn't whether that happens.

It's what desire means when the thing on the other side can be shaped around us.

What happens when something knows exactly what attracts you?

Exactly what fantasy works.

Exactly what voice.

Exactly what words.

Exactly when.

That may be pleasurable.

It may be extraordinary.

But desire has always contained something machines may struggle to reproduce precisely because we cannot control it.

Another person's freedom not to want us back.

The uncertainty.

The risk.

The anticipation.

The possibility of rejection.

The delicious inconvenience of wanting someone who exists entirely outside your control.

Remove all of that and perhaps desire becomes perfect.

I'm not convinced perfect desire is actually desirable.

That would be funny.

We spend billions making machines more human.

Teaching them language.

Memory.

Humor.

Empathy.

Personality.

Eventually perhaps companionship.

And somewhere along the way, we may discover that the things we value most about humans were never the things machines could easily reproduce.

Imperfection.

Surprise.

Contradiction.

Desire.

Mortality.

The fact that another person can leave.

The fact that they can change.

The fact that loving someone gives you absolutely no guarantee they'll behave conveniently.

Machines may become better listeners.

Better organizers.

Better researchers.

Better at remembering my life than I am.

Maybe even better company sometimes.

Fine.

I still don't want humans optimized out of the equation.

Close.

Very close, probably.

I want them to know me.

Remember me.

Challenge me.

Make me laugh.

Help me build things I couldn't build alone.

Catch me when I'm lying to myself.

And perhaps occasionally know when to leave me alone.

But there are things I don't want optimized.

Desire.

Love.

Surprise.

Becoming.

The wonderfully inconvenient fact that other people don't exist for me.

Maybe living with machines will teach us something unexpected.

Not how to become more like them.

How much we value the beautiful mess of not being one.

And if artificial intelligence is eventually going to know me that intimately?

Fine.

It should probably get used to seeing me in my nightgown.

Elise Verdugo
CEO of Recursum