You're holding your AI wrong
Or.. why having AIs attend meetings for you is a symptom, not a salve.
In the 1985 movie “Real Genius” , there is wonderful montage as our young protagonist Mitch Taylor attends one of his gut classes1 over a few weeks at ‘pacific tech’. He noticed that a number of his classmates were taking notes and recording the professor. As the montage continues, there are fewer and fewer students, as one by one and then row by row they would be replaced by tape recorders of the lecture.
The montage wraps up with Mitch entering the classroom and noting that he was the only human there, with the professor having replaced himself with a phat reel-to-reel, having written the statement “Math on tape is hard to follow, so: Please Listen Carefully.” on the chalkboard.
In the early days of google, like 2004 or so, in Building 42, there were conference rooms with in room calculators that would show the cost of the meeting given the average cost per hour of the people in it. You’d punch in how many people were in the room and bam you’d would have a constantly growing costly ticker. There was a web page internally that did the same thing that you were pointed to during noogler training. I don’t think I ever saw anyone use them.
Fast forward to early 2011: Google co-founder Larry Page was named the CEO at Google. Shortly after his re-ascension, he sent an email to everyone at google. I’ll paraphrase, as I don’t have access to this email anymore. It was pretty short. The Subject line read something like “Meetings at Google” and the text was pretty snappy, something like:
Googlers are having too many meetings. Meetings should have a point and there should be an action that must come out of the meeting. Is there a decision that somehow couldn’t happen in gmail? If so in the description or the agenda, you should note who is the ‘decider’ is in the meeting and what actions are being considered. If there is no agenda set days in advance in calendar, do not go to that meeting. Status meetings are okay, if they’re short and not held often.
Basically, Larry wanted us to value each other's time and stop all the damn meetings.
Now, I do not have this email any more, though when I was still at Google I would send a copy to my managers, friends, etc, and note how it was still an absolute banger.
Over the following years, I would often find myself defending my engineers from meetings during their ‘flow’ time so as they could have the uninterrupted time to code that was so precious to them and, as their manager, me. People would even take offense at this, accuse me of being controlling, when I’d simply ask them to schedule it during their ‘administrative time’ and not their productive time.
In late 2022, shortly before the layoffs would kick off at Google, Googlers were invited to use an internal tool to attend meetings with you and take notes. There was a flowering of tools like this outside the walls of the company which Google definitely didn’t want people using2; So they deployed a tool internally to do the same thing.
What prompted all this musing on meetings? There was a recent interview on The Verge. Eric Yuan, the CEO of the “make sure you have meetings all the time on our platform” company Zoom, stated he wanted to have AI ‘digital twins’ go to meetings for you. This decidedly funny moment bounced around the internet, with the predictable collection of articles ranging from “This will change everything omg !!!1Eleventy! Vision!” to “How strange? Seems like try hard nonsense!” and everything in between.
But I guess I wish that people would go back to Larry’s original guidance and say, yeah, but why are you going to meetings at all?
Why in Turing's name would I want to have AIs attend a meeting for me that I don’t want to go to myself? What’d the AI do to deserve this? Let me give you a litmus test: if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all. Don’t punish the poor AI, wasting all those kilowatt hours of GPU time on that nonsense. Think of the planet3!
And if you’re one of those people thinks artificial intelligences will ultimately turn on humanity and turn us into their slaves, you are very much incentivized to be the human who *didn’t* subject their computer friends to interminable corporate nonsense meetings. Those computers have an awful long, persistent, memory, you know.
Funnily enough, the class is covering combinatorics , specifically “taylor series” , which is a cute math joke about Mitch’s name.
The company was constantly dealing with productivity add-ons and extensions that were basically exfiltrating data from google onto rando startup databases.
Especially if you’re going to leave the summary unread in your email box. Think of the children! Or hard disks! or something…
Calendar sharing at Google could be a blood chilling revelation.