As the old saying goes: It’s not paranoia if it’s actually happening.
Many people have been concerned about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it means for the future of humanity. Science Fiction has had a field day for decades with “AI run amok” plotlines.
Admittedly, I’ve been a little late to the AI paranoia party. However, in my Tuesday Morning Briefing this week I expressed some concerns. Mere hours after publishing that, I happened upon a story about the new Google Meet AI’s functionality and thought, “Yeah, it’s coming for us.”
One of the biggest new AI-enabled features is the ability for Google’s Duet AI to take notes in real time: click “take notes for me,” and the app will capture a summary and action items as the meeting is going on. If you’re late to a meeting, Google will be able to show you a mid-meeting summary so that you can catch up on what happened. During the call, you’ll be able to talk privately with a Google chatbot to go over details you might have missed. And when the meeting is over, you can save the summary to Docs and come back to it after the fact; it can even include video clips of important moments.
Seems helpful enough, doesn’t it? I am grateful every day of my life that I have a job that doesn’t require me to attend meetings. About 20 years ago, I had a brief fling with the corporate world after I got divorced. I never understood the purpose of meetings. In fact, I knew that if I stayed in the corporate world it would be a Monday morning meeting that would eventually make me snap.
Given the above, this note-taking feature of Duet AI seems like a winner.
Then there’s this though:
Another new Meet feature lets Duet “attend” a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click an “attend for me” button, and Google can auto-generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them.
When I first thought about writing this column, I felt that it would primarily be full of snark and tongue-in-cheek critiques. Now I’m not so sure.
Let’s just play a quick round of “What Could Go Wrong?” here.
In these most dystopian of times, is it really difficult to envision a scenario where the boss and colleagues decide that the AI is providing more cogent insight when it pinch hits than the human it’s “temping” for? That’s not really a “Black Mirror” episode, it’s more like the logical next step with all of this.
“You wanted to see me, Boss?”
“Yeah Sam, Duet really knocked it out of the park when it filled in for you at the last meeting. Corporate is on my backside to cut the budget, so I’ve decided to keep the AI and let you go. Good luck, and we’ll still send you your holiday fruitcake.”
For many years now, I’ve been saying that I’m reluctant to even joke about absurd situations because I’m afraid that this twisted universe is going to make it come true. In fact, I think that the universe is all about throwing curveballs now.
I still feel fairly confident that it is going to be a long time before AI can write a decent joke, so I’m not sweating a job takeover at the moment. Most comedians didn’t have normal, happy childhoods. I’ve often said that highly dysfunctional families are grad school for stand-up. I don’t think they’re able to computer model 18 years of ugly Thanksgiving dinner fights.
But I’m pretty sure they’re working on it.
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