The original note, as written at the time
A good use for anthropomorphic robots and AI general is this. It can enhance our social engagement. Imagine being able to attend to hundreds of social engagements in a single day. Imagine being able to chat with all your friends and family every single day. You could jump into and out of any conversation without leaving the other person feeling undervalued.
Ongoing development
A good use for anthropomorphic robots and general AI: it can enhance our social engagement to a scale we have never had.
Imagine being able to attend to hundreds of social engagements in a single day. Imagine being able to talk with all your friends and family, every single day, rather than the four you currently manage.
The obvious objection is that this is fake — that a machine standing in the room at your cousin’s wedding while you are in another city is not you attending. That objection is stronger than we admit and I want to keep it on the table. But notice what it is beside. It is beside a present in which the average person attends almost none of it, because the arithmetic of time has made the whole round of human obligation impossible.
It is also beside the thing that actually breaks relationships: the feeling of being dropped. You do not stop loving your family when the message goes unanswered for six weeks. You stop believing that you are held in their mind. A machine that can hold a hundred threads and let you jump into any of them for four minutes — and jump out without the other person feeling undervalued — is not a substitute for the relationship. It is a way of keeping it warm.
And there is liberty in it, which is the part that gets missed. Most of us avoid social contact not from indifference but from the fear of being trapped in it, and a system that lets you enter and leave cleanly removes that fear. The person who can leave at any moment is the person who stays longer.
The danger is real and it is the obvious one: the machine starts having the conversation and you stop. So the robot should be a relay, not an agent — carrying your voice, not inventing one, and never smoothing over the awkwardness that tells two people they are talking to each other rather than to an intermediary.