The AI conference at the auto club
If your agentic AI wants to send me and my coat chocolates, I'll accept
A recent event made me have many, many thoughts about important things like AI, cars, and indoor temperatures. You’ll maybe understand this when I tell you that I recently attended a private “AI in Business” event. It was held at an auto club. I was cold the entire day. Not to be dramatic, but I felt a little bit like The Little Match Girl, shivering away in my chair.
Even my puffy down coat zipped all the way up was not sufficient to keep me warm, and I was driven to using the tablecloth as a lap quilt. As we humans are prone to do, I got resourceful at corporate events; it helps every time, even if it looks a little tacky. I have this radical thought that we humans were never meant to sit, for hours, in cold rooms. A younger woman wearing a mini-skirt and tank top either has a very different set of priorities than mine (be warm when at all possible), or we have very different internal thermostats.
Caption: This pic of my beloved puffy coat and empty ice cream cup comes to us from Kitty Hawk-ish, North Carolina. If not Kitty Hawk specifically, somewhere on the Outer Banks.
My newly acquired thoughts about cars are pretty simple: there are cars, and then there are CARS. My immaculately-maintained car—a 2021 Toyota Rav4 for your information—looks like something bound for the junkyard when compared to the CARS this auto club stores for their fancy owners.
As riveting as are my thoughts about cars and indoor temperatures, my AI thoughts are even more interesting. You can’t spend a whole day freezing in an auto club, hearing people talk about AI, without getting more thoughts about it.
This event was an intimate affair of maybe six dozen people, with most attendees being leaders in business. Some of these people are making millions and have a kazillion social media followers. And then there was me, a writer who doesn’t think she’d trade her life’s work with any of the people in the room who are building some cool things with AI.
One company has figured out how to automate the worst parts of sales. They use AI to call prospects, share very openly that the “voice” is an AI agent, and ask if the prospect is interested in such-and-such product. If so, the AI “BDR” passes them over to a human sales person to continue the conversation. I wonder what the likes of Zig Zigler would have to say about salespeople no longer having to be refined in the fire of rejection. Next thing you know, we’ll have robots doing door-to-door summer sales.
Another founder has singlehandedly built an AI software offering which is revolutionizing social media giveaways.
Another small company is using AI to automate paperwork in an industry not necessarily known for being innovative—roofing. That’s at least what one of the cofounders shared; I personally have no clue whether it’s innovative or not. I could go on and on, but won’t.
These seem like cool examples of using AI to build things.
I am…ah…less enthused, however, about some of the interpersonal ways in which some people are using AI. We both know that I’m a writer, right? And that I write and care about the human experience and humorous stuff and being thoughtful about life and others. Right? Good. That part of me wants no part of some of the things I saw, no sirree.
Exhibit A:
Do you remember the eyeglasses made by some major brand that creeped everyone else out because strangers could photograph you without you knowing? While I can’t recall who made them, I can recall that they looked tacky and we didn’t like them. Well, there are now AI wearable devices that record and upload every conversation you have or hear whether others know it or not.
I don’t even like AI notetakers on video meetings. Especially when we’re getting to know each other, talking about sensitive stuff (I do this all the time), or catching up. Part of my beef is that I don’t want a conversation between two humans stored, analyzed and remembered. That, not analysis, is the purpose of our memories, hearts, and notes we care enough to take. We’re already doing too much analysis of literally everything.
Exhibit B:
Here’s another “gem.” There’s an AI tool out there which runs a personality assessment on the LinkedIn profile of the person you’re about to have a meeting with. We both know how I feel about personality assessments, especially in a corporate setting. This AI tool tells you how to approach this particular human in order to close the deal, get the job, or have them think positive things about you. What if said human has been using AI to write everything on their profile? What then?
You can say the AI-approved “right things” all day long, use the tone AI recommends, and you might even get the “desired result.” But what if the desired result is authentic human connection? You didn’t get that, did ya? If we forget (or never learned in the first place) how to actually listen deeply and care about connection over results, we as a society are going to be further up a sad, disconnected creek than we already are.
AI can’t care for anyone. It can only act like it cares. Maybe the person using AI in interpersonal ways does actually care about people. But if they don’t have to actively use the muscle of caring and making effort, will they lose it? Could be.
There’s something pretty dang disingenuous about your agentic AI listening to a conversation for a sentimental date, writing a “thoughtful” card, and sending it along with flowers on that date. That wouldn’t mean much to me personally so feel free to abort your AI’s plan to send me flowers on my birthday. On second thought, though, if it was going to send chocolates, please proceed.
Agentic AI ordering chocolates aside, I don’t think gorgeous human traits like thoughtfulness were intended to be outsourced. In fact, I’d argue—LOUDLY—that it and things like empathy cannot be outsourced. The pretense of it can, but the sentiment cannot since, as my dad put it succinctly: “Thoughtfulness requires sacrifice.” You know, the sort of sacrifice inherent in writing letters of recommendation, spending an hour combing through Etsy to find a necklace your neon-loving BFF will hopefully adore, showing up on someone’s porch just to listen at a tender times, making actual phone calls to aging loved ones, caring enough to store someone’s name and favorite Christmas treat in your memory. Or the sorts of things that are, and ought to remain, entirely human territory in my book.
Isn’t human life cool, and aren’t people interesting? See you in the next one…
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