Face It.

Tuned into the Zoom seminar late, but not too late to catch this grabber, courtesy of the dept. of choking clouds and silver linings via New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. Soon, virtually all emails will be written, parsed, and responded to by AI. No sloth-like meatware invited, or required.

Okay, nothing wildly new there. Like Zoom and desktop video itself, the notion of trained LLMs taking over tasks (“Dear gnat-like vending machine supplier”) and scheduling follow-ups (query: breakroom AI re: quantity of Soylent Green ramen bowls) are always going to be part of the long-predicted tomorrow right up to the moment they become a part of dull old today.

But that’s where it got interesting. His view: if we’re all aware that all emails are largely end-to-end AI-to-AI, it will devalue a channel that’s often more isolating than connective. That, in turn, will re-value the meaning of actual human get-togetherness.

As in physical face-to-face. Person-to-person. Grill-to-grill. 

His follow-up, delivered to what I hope was the muted ad agency audience guffawing: “that might even kill email and wouldn’t that be just too bad?”

Talk about unintended consequences. Here, a good swath of the experts have been telling us tthat making humans less and less relevant will be the first step on the road to Terminator-AI stomping out humanity. Maybe, conceivably, possibly, the reality will be something different.

Making human contact, in the collaborative and collective sense, more precious.

Could put a whole new face on things, no?