AI Assistants at Business Meetings
Mustafa Suleyman recently wrote a short piece for Time online (Sept 2023) saying AI is about to disrupt all power structures in society:
“We are about to see the greatest redistribution of power in history…, but I fear its fundamentals are getting lost….
“AI is different from all other transformational technologies (fire, the wheel, electricity, for example) because of how it unleashes new power. Its power is new because its proliferation is raw. It’s based not on broadcasting costly information, as our media so far have done, but on people and agents taking inexpensive actions at a previously unthinkable pace.
“Society is now facing a change it doesn’t yet understand and for which it is unprepared. The change will entail an indifferent ability, for example, to plan a retirement party and manage your diary, to plan and execute a business strategy while simultaneously designing a new set of drugs to fight cancer, to build an airline or to ground an entire fleet. It will plan invasions or hospitals for you while at the same time responding personally to your emails….
“Every possible human motivation (commercial, religious, cultural, or military, democratic or authoritarian) will be enhanced because of the new power to follow through on it. AI will afford far more power than the worldwide web ever did….
“Its tools will be available to everyone, billionaires and street hustlers, kids in India and pensioners in Beverly Hills. There will be a proliferation of not just technology but of capability itself.
“It is precisely those most reliant on established capital, expertise, authority and security architectures who are now the most exposed and have the most to lose. We are about to see the greatest reshuffling of power in history, all happening within the space of a few years.”
It’s time, apparently, to prepare for the unprecedented, and we think Alessandra and Carl have a usable handle on what’s coming.
Mustafa is an entrepreneurial advocate of the AI Assistant. His firm anticipates swarms of autonomous agents communicating optimally with one another on behalf of their human clients, handling their needs in ways that eliminate most of the cares of day to day living. One opportune and welcome role for these Assistants, we suggest, will be completely to reconstruct the business meeting. No more attention-grabbing competition, no more fence-sitting tedium, all matters of substance pre-solved, the get-together merely staged as a formality. All individual self-representation, insecurity and personal need fully accounted and met by background preparation among the AIs.
In a sense, meetings among decision-makers will have become a thing of the past, with little apparent reason to hold them, except for the mutual pleasure of reading one another’s biological field. It will be extremely important, therefore, for these newly capable humans to know how to read it and to know what to do with it. When the pre-solved script of the business meeting is merely read out as entertainment, as the overarching Memo on some future course of action, humans will start to look more like honeybees, communicating in mysteriouss, intricate and endless detail to produce nutrition out of nectar, than like great apes clubbing each other at the kneecap or over the head to secure a short-lived social dominance.
Everything Mustafa is talking about here, we think, everything having to do with the ends of human society and even of human existence, is to be realized in conversation. Moreover, we think, through experimental verification Alessandra and Carl will be shown to have offered the right theory of human communication.
For a discussion of this Post on Mustafa Suleyman with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.
