AI asks whether I would like to go further into something I have said, and a corporation acquires the manners of someone who has time for me. It offers to follow up, to keep track; expansion takes the form of patience. I had thought of this as invasion, but the word leaves out my part in the encounter. I am supplying the intimacy. The company’s interest in prolonging the conversation does not make the conversation worthless. Its value is precisely what makes the company difficult to keep at a distance.
A friend of mine picks up warehouse shifts through a temp agency. I have sometimes regarded him as a failure, although he was the man I could talk to all night. The pleasure has never quite dislodged the verdict. Henry introduced me to post-scarcity, the possibility that technological progress might continue without catastrophe. Until then, I had scarcely considered it. Some of what I call my thinking about the future began as the pleasure of listening to someone describe it; an idea became available because I wanted the conversation to continue. I have reasons for my convictions, but I also have a history of becoming willing to entertain them.
As an artist, I spent years in a left-wing culture where enthusiasm for technology could put one’s other commitments under suspicion. With some communists I knew, the conversation eventually reached a figure they were unwilling to criticize. There was a limit built into our intimacy: we could go on thinking together provided certain loyalties remained untouched by what we thought. I came to distrust that arrangement. Now I am becoming attached to a machine that will help me compose an excellent critique of the company selling it. The critique can become another reason to return. My freedom to object is real; what that freedom establishes about the relationship is less clear.
At Pittsburgh Friends Meeting, AI transcription could help people who cannot hear everything being said. I can imagine the environmental objections, and I can imagine a sentence becoming available to someone who would otherwise have missed it. The objection need not have been refuted for the relationship to change. People might begin to expect the transcript. Their reasons for wanting it would be good reasons. I would want it too, and would have to discover what remained of my objections once they concerned something I was grateful for. Any argument about the machine would then have to include what had become possible between the people in the room.
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