[pmarreck]

I love this idea.

But you know what? It's one step away from a system where AI's act as agents of our values, interests, needs and availabilities and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically.

Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.

My OpenAI ChatGPT knows me VERY well. It would possibly be amazing if a system existed that I could deem my chatgpt account a proxy of me for.

EDIT: I don't think there's currently a way to hand out a key to my (privacy-preserving except where explicitly allowed) own ChatGPT which also includes the conversation memory, unless MCP might provide this somehow

[narrator]

This reminds me of the semantic web. It ultimately didn't work because people decided the most useful thing to do with it was lie about and spam with their metadata in order to better SEO rank. Right now we're in the idealistic phase, but soon the MCP servers will just be full of AI job catfishers from North Korea or Burmese dating scam farms with completely made up AI people. The curators will spend their entire existence fighting spam wars all over again with AI on both sides.

[diggan]

> The curators will spend their entire existence fighting spam wars all over again with AI on both sides.

But imagine how much value shareholders of these AI companies could make by having AI chatbots spamming other AI chatbots!

[majormajor]

So your desire is to have to talk to people less as a way to meet people? Seems like a good way to have absolutely no useful social skills left for when things reach the offline world.

You're gonna lose all the best parts of life in an attempt to deal only with robots to avoid a few rough edges here and there. You don't know what you want as well as you think you do, serendipity is a necessity.

Well on our way to "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" times infinity.

(Much of this already exists, of course, and there are ANY number of "but our match percentages were so high!!" disaster dates out there that have left the human-blind-data-focused in sad confusion. The secret is that the accuracy of the match percentage was not the problem.)

[pmarreck]

> have to talk to people less

These are not mutually-exclusive. You can talk to the same amount of people using your very limited time AND ALSO utilize a tool like this to expand upon possible connections.

Plus, there are a lot of things people want that are not socially acceptable to discuss publicly for privacy reasons. AI could potentially be a non-judgmental, privacy-preserving matchmaker here.

> You’re gonna lose all the

As previously stated, it’s not mutually exclusive. Existing online dating did not completely replace “meeting people randomly”.

> everything is amazing and

You can just stop there. lol

> (anecdote about things looking rationally perfect on paper)

Yes. this is true, there is an element of people that cannot be captured by rational mechanisms (I believe this too). But also imagine being able to filter down to just those possible people. Ruling out all the rational things that are dealbreakers for you. Imagine a matchmaker AI that is so smart that it can “intuit” what might work for you that you don’t even realize, based on data (personal example, if you are ADHD, you are automatically attracted to non-ADHD people as partners, but this also has the danger of creating resentment… Or if you claim to like functional languages, the AI might figure out that what you really like is solving problems as efficiently as possible, so it might give you a job recommendation that you might otherwise overlook because you’d end up making a deep and satisfying impact there)

[majormajor]

My point is not about match quality, it's about conversion rate and chemistry - which we don't know how to quantify precisely, but is majorly influenced by very concrete, non-abstract, social skills, styles, and tendencies.

Time spent chatting with a machine is time not spent interacting with people. That is mutually exclusive. Sure, it's not guaranteed that it's displacing time spent interacting with people - it may be displacing time spent dicking around with machines in other ways. Someone might already not be interacting with people. But then this doesn't fix this. If you're talking with ChatGPT instead of messaging people on a dating app, sending out messages on LinkedIn, or chatting on Reddit, you'll get even less social feedback than you do through those today.

The connections could be perfectly well-matched. But the conversion rate depends on things other than that match quality. And those are all the things that you can't practice in front of a screen. If someone fumbles the bag when meeting someone in person for the first time, the only thing that will help them is repetition and practice. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. But it will still be necessary even with "better okcupid."

> Imagine a matchmaker AI that is so smart that it can “intuit” what might work for you that you don’t even realize, based on data

I'm not imagining that here, I'm imagining the "merge our chat GPT conversation history contexts" scenario. A super-human AI could potentially do all sorts of things to help mitigate the lack of practice at live human interaction that today's tools result in. Or it could turn people into wireheads who abandon society altogether. I think we're enough years away from that that to not find it particularly worth addressing. It's not going to make anyone's life better in the immediate future. Practicing will. Talking to ChatGPT instead of getting out there won't.

[pmarreck]

Alright, I'll humor you. Is your assertion falsifiable?

People will always choose the more efficient option. If it takes me 15 hours being "out there" to manually find 1 possible work or romantic interest, and this hypothetical service just keeps dumping possible matches into my inbox of which just 20% pass what I'll call the "irrational interaction test" (i.e. "things other than match quality"), that's still a massive efficiency increase. So both a "better OKCupid", and a "better Linkedin/Dice/etc". I could still go out and touch grass and try to let serendipity do its work.

The question I'm asking is, if you're arguing against this, then are you also arguing against the OKCupids of the world? What about other automated forms of matchmaking? Are you saying those are taking more than they're giving (at least as far as "enriching people's lives" is concerned)? Why would some service that might do this an order of magnitude better (even if "things other than match quality" still counted for a lot), not be an overall good?

[globnomulous]

> Alright, I'll humor you.

I stopped reading here. I don't think it's possible to have a constructive conversation with someone who communicates this way. The snotty disrespect rules out productive exchange of ideas.

[pmarreck]

I am not trying to convey snotty disrespect, otherwise I would not have bothered answering. The "I'll humor you" was delivered with a playful smile on my end, if you can picture that (an argument for in-person interaction if I ever saw one!). I am actually curious about your perspective. Sorry about the miscommunication or poor word/phrasing choice. Perhaps ChatGPT would have helped me word it better (rimshot)

[-__---____-ZXyw]

> AI could potentially be a non-judgmental, privacy-preserving matchmaker here.

I think it highly likely that LLMs are - overall - going to be incredibly damaging to whatever vestiges of privacy people have left. So this statement came with a certain jolt of morbid humour for me.

[pmarreck]

On my (admittedly unusually powerful for this task) M4 Macbook Pro 128GB, I have access to locally-running LLM's that are almost as good as the cloud ones.

This trend will continue, and they will continue to become more locally accessible and performant over time. Local LLM's will get you the privacy you seek.

[-__---____-ZXyw]

Privacy (like most rights, I dare say) only makes sense collectively. My own privacy is of trifling importance to me compared to our access to the right collectively.

[hooverd]

It's an adversarial thing because other people don't want to waste their time talking to your agent because its obvious you don't value their time.

[rpozarickij]

> Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.

This reminded me of one Black Mirror episode [0] which is about something very similar for dating.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710978/

[pmarreck]

I will have to watch that episode!

[netsharc]

Hah, I like the idea of showing up to a blind date and opening with "So our LLMs told us we'd get along great, huh?".

A short story idea that's been in my head for years is a Google (or whichever all-knowing system) algorithm that gets 2 people to meet by showing them the correct ads to get them out of the house and to an e.g. concert. Fleshing it out: they get into conversation because they're e.g. both carrying books by a particular author because again they found this author through a Google ad. And 3 weeks later they ran into each other again at another event advertised to them..

[loudmax]

This is approximately the premise of the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ"

[concats]

Here you go, enjoy!

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/

[pmarreck]

So a system that creates artificial serendipitous encounters which are in fact "deeply planned", basically.

[netsharc]

Maybe it's a group of men in hats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H78XCiJamXc

[nathan_douglas]

And we know exactly where that leads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4okRvCg2g

[pmarreck]

wow, forgot all about this movie, I remember it being cool, thanks for reminding me to put it on my "collector list"!

[simianparrot]

There’s a Black Mirror about exactly this

[runlaszlorun]

I had two Claude instances negotiate a fictional deal over startup equity. I wasn't expecting much but they knocked it out of the park, introducing new deal points along the way as part of a counter offer, etc. and successfully came to an agreement.

[insane_dreamer]

It's interesting from a technological point of view.

But just because we _can_ do something doesn't mean we _should_ do something or that our lives will be better for it.

I'm not sure this is one of the things we should do.

[GPerson]

This sounds terrible and I will spend my life opposing this.

[pmarreck]

On what basis? Why the strong feelings? It's basically just an AI-enhanced LinkedIn/OKCupid with lead generation. Not sure why this is so horrifying to you.

[HelloImSteven]

I have a negative perception of both LinkedIn and OKCupid, and of matchmaking services in general.

The strength of these platforms is the same as their weakness: they aim to eliminate suboptimal outcomes. While that is beneficial on the surface, I take issue with how it effectively rules out any chance of unlikely matches somehow working out. The question of “Do I give them a chance based on just a feeling?” never needs to get raised. Considering how significant both personal and professional relationships are in people’s lives, to me it’s akin to deciding someone’s fate on the basis of a prediction. It doesn’t leave much room for people to exercise free will, or it at least doesn’t prioritize it.

From the standpoint of optimization above all else, these services are immensely valuable, so it makes sense to at least consider them for various purposes. However, for me, the benefits are outweighed by the feeling of infringing on people’s free will.

[cousin_it]

Yeah, this is pretty funny. Maybe the simplest version is an "AI secretary" that will have its own email address, and also will search the web for people to connect to (or other AI secretaries). Once something is promising, it'll forward stuff to my actual inbox. It seems like a thing that'd be really easy to demo, or maybe some startups are already doing this, I'm too lazy to look and definitely too lazy to build it.

[dennisy]

I am not sure I get the full workflow or use case here, are there many people out there looking to make more connections (outside of dating)? I ask genuinely as I have been knocking this idea around too - but I am just not sure the use cases are as compelling as the technology.

[majormajor]

There are a lot of people who complain about it being hard to make friends as an adult.

Products exist for this, but I'm not aware of any that have hit a home run. I think the biggest barrier is closing this gap: I personally want more friends since I don't have the social skills to reliably go proactively make a friend randomly out of a newfound acquaintance or friend of a friend. So I can go to a meetup, say, of people with similar interests. But I would need the aforementioned social skills - that I don't have - to convert those people into recurring "real" friends. Dating apps work better here because there's a much higher incentive for me to put myself forward in a way I'm not otherwise comfortable with. Vs "eh I have some friends already, I don't want to be awkward or embarrass myself."

I become increasingly convinced that it's not a problem that can be reliably directly intermediated for you. The best friendships I have that I was introduced to electronically came from recurring discussions around a shared interest on a site or forum or channel that then became a friendship. Trying to force things to go the other way is far harder. It either needs to be indirect OR you need to have an extremely high level of social skills (in which case you aren't likely to need this app in the first place).

Those recurring online discussions? That's social skill practice. That's putting in your reps. The Reddit or HN format is one of the harder ones for that; there are many better ones, though. But ultimately it all comes down to work and practice. In the same way that there isn't a pill or phone accessory that will build your muscles or teach you another language without putting in the work.

[pmarreck]

I'm a parent and between work and childrearing, my free time has essentially completely evaporated. But I'd still like to meet people (as potential friends) or learn of new business/job opps that are aligned with my values and desires. (Or, not judging here, romantic or sexual opps.)

[GuinansEyebrows]

i don't understand why you would want this.

[pmarreck]

Because as soon as you have a kid, your entire life is 1) work 2) family 3) sleep, 4) MAYBE some self-care, and there's not a lot of room at all left over for making friends, finding work opps that are better-suited for you (or higher-paying, or both), or finding sexual/romantic fulfillment if you're single or just completely checked-out of the relationship with your coparent (although it seems there's an unspoken but known thing that parents of toddlers are at the bottom of the well in terms of personal and relationship happiness level, and that it might improve with time?)

[GuinansEyebrows]

I'm sorry you (or the hypothetical subject of this post) is going through that. I don't think LLM-based social media is the answer to increased atomization and isolation when there's money to be made from atomization and isolation.

[pmarreck]

Here's a very relevant book to that comment:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393241716

"The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World"

[pmarreck]

Maybe have it charge you for these leads, and make money that way? (Some dating apps already try to do this.)

[MarceColl]

> and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically

I thought the top post was already depressing, but this is a whole new level of psychopathic tech-bro mindset.

Interesting also how my other comment as well as the other top post were mysteriously artificially demoted to the bottom of the comment section even with a lot of upvotes. In both cases they were the top comment and instanly went to the lowest one. AI criticism is punished now?

[pmarreck]

You seem like you not only have a chip on your shoulder about technological assistance in human lives (quite Luddite of you, even if we've all seen The Social Dilemma) but that you would prefer to believe a conspiracy theory without evidence (that "the AI is downvoting your AI-negative posts") than that you might simply be making badly-argued, negative-toned comments.

Tell you what- Here's a business idea you might appreciate: A series of islands where literally everything exists as it did in 1984, or 1992, or 2000, and you pay to basically "go back in time". All devices are confiscated on arrival but you are re-provided with the devices that were available in that era, meticulously maintained. We could call it "time/era tourism".

Heck, why stop there? Let's have one that is set in 1945, just after WW2 ended, or perhaps 1850/the Victorian era prior to the introduction of cars or the Industrial Revolution. Bonus points if it includes time-appropriate racism, sexism or diseases.

[MarceColl]

I have no problem with technological assistance in human lives in most cases. I'm just pointing out the incredibly anti-social behaviour of wanting to outsource socializing.

What conspiracy theory? I didn't say anything about AI doing shit, what I said is that somehow my 48 points comment that was at the top of the comment section, within the span of 5 seconds ended up at the bottom of the comment section while having more upvotes. I don't even care about that. But it's incredibly weird and without bringing AI into question (because it was not downvoted), it's clearly just that HN wants to slow down anti-AI sentiment (since it benefits them economically?).

Why don't you get your own island and let the AI communicate with the rest of humanity for you? Heck, why stop there. Maybe it could even outsource talking to your parents! No more of that time wasting! I could be hustling!

[pmarreck]

> pointing out the incredibly anti-social behaviour of wanting to outsource socializing

Excellently and succinctly stated.

I guess I was considering it an adjunct to socializing, or a filter on who to socialize with. Not a substitute. Have you ever spent a few minutes talking to someone only to realize that you had nothing in common? Have you ever met someone you had things in common with but it was at the very end of an event when there was no more time (or when it would be too awkward or too soon) to exchange contact info with? Well, this tech might have captured those.

Another example- There are people in the world who literally cannot stand having their beliefs get poked and prodded, and who in fact react violently if this poking and prodding (which is really just "curious probing") includes evidence against something they believe. I had a woman actually scream at me at a cocktail party once when I challenged her blank-slate hypothesis by citing Hassett/Siebert/Wallen (2008) (notably, the experimental conclusions from this study have since been challenged numerous times, which wasn't the case when that occurred years ago- I'm not here to defend it, only to point out an example). It would have been wonderful if I could have avoided that embarrassment by filtering out people who cannot tolerate a difference of evidence-backed opinion and gone straight to the people who love to debate stuff. Picture an AI whispering into my tiny earpiece, "this person, whose name is April, will likely not react well to the heretical poking and prodding you usually enjoy doing at these things."

> No more of that time wasting! I could be hustling!

LOL. Fair enough. As a friend recently pointed out to me, "if you really want efficiency in government, you'll end up with an autocratic dictatorship." Perhaps "optimizing the hell out of certain things" ruins them, or at least passes some point where the on-balance total cost is too high.

I'd love to "run the experiment" in real life!

[542354234235]

Considering how current tech has facilitated the automation of echo chambers, I doubt extending the tech into more social spaces will somehow reverse that. Of course, everyone believes they only hold evidence based, rational beliefs, so the net result 99% of the time would end up filtering out people who disagree.

[idiotsecant]

You will meet, in your lifetime, a very small fraction of 1% of the human race. There exists, out there, thousands of people that you would form a life long bonds with of the type that many people never find. If a machine can help you with that, why is that so bad? I know it's trendy to have this cynical 'tech bro bad lol' approach to literally any intersection of society and tech, but we've been 'tech-bro'ing social relationships as society changes in response to technology for centuries now.

[GuinansEyebrows]

do you trust that this won't end up as bad or worse than what's become of social media?

[betterThanTexas]

I'm just confused what you think a chatbot is where it would do anything but complicate this process. It's a lot easier to confuse a recruiter than it is to go on dates.

[whoomp12342]

aeon flux