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So many people are so caught up in all the things that they think artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to do for us, that they keep ignoring all of the things that AI can do to us.
One of those people, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, discussed in a recent interview with The Verge how he believes that the day will soon come when an AI avatar of a person, a “digital twin,” will be doing most of their job for them.
Naturally, the interview took place, where else, over Zoom and in it Yuan shared on example of how this could work with the interviewer.
“Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join,” he said. “I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach. Or I do not need to check my emails; the digital version of myself can read most of the emails. Maybe one or two emails will tell me, ‘Eric, it’s hard for the digital version to reply. Can you do that?’
“Again, today we all spend a lot of time either making phone calls, joining meetings, sending emails, deleting some spam emails and replying to some text messages, still very busy. How [do we] leverage AI, how do we leverage Zoom Workplace, to fully automate that kind of work? That’s something that is very important for us.”
“We have a big audience of product managers, engineers, and designers. I think what you’re saying is they’re going to send AI avatars to their stand-ups every morning,” the interviewer followed up.
“More than that,” Yuan replied. “It’s not only for meetings. Even for my emails. I truly hate reading email every morning, and ideally, my AI version for myself reads most of the emails. We are not there yet.”
Someday soon, however, he hopes it will happen.
“Let’s assume, fast-forward five or six years, that AI is ready,” he explained. “AI probably can help for maybe 90 percent of the work, but in terms of real-time interaction, today, you and I are talking online. So, I can send my digital version. You can send your digital version.”
Just what we all need right? Less personal interaction with actual humans.
On the plus side…
“Why do we need to work five days a week?” Yuan continued. “Down the road, four days or three days. Why not spend more time with your family? Why not focus on some more creative things, giving you back your time, giving back to the community and society to help others, right? Today, the reason why we cannot do that is because every day is busy, five days a week. It’s boring.”
He even believes that we will have different versions of our AI “selves” we can send to meetings, etc. One example he used was for a sales meeting.
“Hey, tune that parameter to have better negotiation skills, send that version, and join,” he said, pretending to decide which AI avatar to send.
He claims to be concerned about AI hallucinations, or incorrect or misleading results that AI models generate, but believes that will eventually be debugged by… someone.
But there are a whole host of other issues that will need to be addressed before anyone would ever want to send an AI avatar in their place to a meeting, or anywhere else for that matter.