AI, Intimacy, and the Attention We're About to Give Away

Saturday Coffee Talk is where I think out loud over an extra cup of coffee.

I think AI will have many positive benefits for the world.

I’m excited for the opportunities it will create for so many people.

But I do worry about how much we will allow AI to consume our attention in the same way we gave it up to social media.

When you have a conversation with someone and share your vulnerabilities, it creates intimacy. I’m not talking about the sexual kind of intimacy. But opening up to someone does draw you closer.

And it creates trust.

If something is conversational, and it knows so much about you, and it’s integrated in some way into your life, then what does that reliance look like?

Social media had the iPhone to help create this reliance.

I wonder what it will be with AI?

Right now there’s still a lot of friction for most people who aren’t advanced users of AI. You largely have to pull up a separate app to have AI do something for you.

But someone will create a device that solves problems we didn’t even know we had, like Apple did with the iPhone.

Apple did not invent the smart phone. But Apple made you feel like you were missing out for not having one because it helped you do so many things that previously had been tied to a piece of paper or another person.

To be honest, I was fine with a paper calendar back in the day. But it was awfully compelling to be able to keep tabs on calendar changes when I was on the move between meetings.

The FOMO for the first few iPhones was a phenomenon all its own.

Apple’s real genius was in tapping into routine pain points no one was really trying to fix. Solving the calendar problem was not a big frontier development.

Except it was.

Adding a camera was just the obvious icing on the cake.

AI is moving fast, and it stands to integrate into our lives so seamlessly we may not even think about it for another 15 years.

But it will have to be so compelling that we overlook the long-term costs in order to get those immediate benefits.

The form that takes may not be obvious.

Most people are picturing robots.

But it could be something more low-key, something that just becomes part of how you get through a Tuesday.

Maybe I’m wrong.

No one knows exactly where this will all truly land.

But I know that none of us really saw the impact social media would have when we were all clamoring to decorate our MySpace page with animated gifs.

More people are starting to count that cost now. But many people haven’t really started using AI capabilities yet.

And when they do, it won’t look like what the early adopters have been doing.