[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)

[globnomulous]

Helpful reminder that tone is hard both to convey and to detect. Best to be generous when we make assumptions. Thanks for explaining.

[-__---____-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.