I tried to reassure a friend about AI at a party, but ended up spooking us both

AI is inescapable in a way that makes you wonder why you took the day off in the first place. It’s not just that there are countless chatbots and generative models to choose from, it’s that the arrival and prevalence of this fast-growing-and-changing-technology, like a earworm everyday consumers can’t shake.

The relentless strain of artificial intelligence is as catchy as Hey Ya, Outkast’s propulsive tune of the early oughts that helped perpetuate the myth that you have to shake a Polaroid picture to develop it. And Polaroid photos are actually a lot like AI, they need no assistance to go from blank and vague to sharp, clear, contrasty, and specific.

The beat of AI follows me everywhere. As someone who covers technology for a living, everyone wants to talk to me about it. At work, where I write about it and often experiment with various generative models to test their limits, this is understandable. But now the AI chatter is following me home.

AI Appetizer

Recently, I was at a friend’s house where more than half-a dozen high-school chums gathered, people I’ve literally known for decades. As we stood around sipping drinks (me, water) and hoovering up cheese and crispy snacks, one friend started casually quizzing me about AI.

As someone who works in banking, she had a understanding of how AI might be employed at work but she was concerned with more personal and meatier issues. When would AI take over? When would we become too attached? When might we love a robot?

We talked at length for 30 minutes or so about all these topics. I explained that one of the things that made it hard to assess the AI road ahead was that most AI model development for, among other things, the best AI chatbots had broken technology’s traditional 18-month development cycle and even Moore’s Law, which posited that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, essentially doubling computing capability. 

AI models, by contrast, developed at 3-to-6 month pace and the intelligence and capability leaps often seem to move at more than double in these time frames.

The more we talked, the more uncomfortable I became, and this was odd. Usually, I’m the rationalizer. I take tough tech concepts and break them down for friends and family (and sometimes audiences on TV). What seems scary or beyond our grasp is usually not. Technology – or even most devices – can be confusing when looked at as a whole. But if you break them down into their parts or tasks, the picture sharpens, clarifies, and becomes graspable. Plus, most tech has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a self-contained smartphone, your computer, or even a VR headset. Software expands the capabilities but doesn’t necessarily alter them in a some fundamental way.

AI, though, is amorphous and expansive. I challenge you to find the beginning, middle or end. It’s a vast corpus of possibilities reaching out in every direction.

Unjust desserts

The other thing that concerned me in our chat was that I was failing to comfort her. I did not convince her that AI wouldn’t eat certain jobs (basic writing tasks, managing money and accounts, customer service). I was unable to find an argument that said we would never love an AI.

On that last issue, I dove into a rabbit hole where humans are, fundamentally, complex biological machines, and the only difference between us and a robot with an AI brain was the level of sophistication. While AI can only ape human emotion now, who’s to say that it won’t actually have something approaching it in a decade (or less)?

I recalled that iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, once told me how C-3PO-style robots were decades if not more off and we should not expect anything like them before 2050. But I realized we hadn’t spoken in a while and maybe, with the advent of generative AI, he felt differently. I told her about Future.AI and its new Future 02 robot. Sure, it walked poorly, but its torso and and hands could move expressively and OpenAI’s large language models gave it a simulacrum of personality.

Conversations with AI chatbots are not uncommon these days and in recent months they’ve shown alarming signs of humanness. There’s a back and forth, I told my friend, that was once only possible with another person. She appeared fascinated and more than a little alarmed.

We agreed that the concern was not necessarily for us. We’d be doddering and old (we hoped) by the time AI fully took command. The worries lay with our children.

She recalled how she once told her child that they could love anyone they wanted except for a robot. “That was a joke,” she started, “…and now it’s not.” I added.

I walked away from the discussion more than a little rattled.

As the night was winding down, my friend told another one of our friends how we chatted about AI and “Lance made me feel better about it.” The other friend asked, “Really?”

“No,” she laughed, “no he did not.”

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