The original note, as written at the time
Specialists concerned with enhancing physical person to person relationships in a world where AI will be the default companion.
Ongoing development
Specialists concerned with enhancing physical, person-to-person relationships, in a world where AI will be the default companion.
A new profession, and I think an inevitable one. We are about to have a generation for whom the frictionless option is always available — something that listens, never misunderstands, never has a bad day, never asks for anything. And the ordinary friendship will look, by comparison, expensive.
The specialist’s job is not therapy. It is closer to what a good host does, or a good teacher of a physical skill: they design the conditions under which two people can actually be together, and then they get out of the way. A supper with a rule about phones. A walk with a purpose. A workshop where two strangers have to make something neither can make alone.
That is craft, it is teachable, and it is currently nobody’s job. We have wedding planners, corporate facilitators, sports coaches — but no discipline for the ordinary maintenance of human contact, which is the thing most at risk.
The reason it will be needed is not that people will stop wanting each other. It is that the cost of a failed attempt will rise. When the alternative is a companion that never disappoints, a person who has been misunderstood once has a reason to stop trying, and the reason is rational.
So the specialist is partly a keeper of the case for the difficult version. They remind people, with evidence, that attention which can be withdrawn is worth more than attention which cannot — that the limits are what make it mean anything.
And they should be paid, because a society that needs someone to hold open the door to other people should not rely on the goodwill of the few who happen to care. That is exactly how the care work we already have ended up undervalued and exhausted.