Laura Preston didn’t really believe in the promise of artificial intelligence—which is exactly why Project Voice, a conference about conversational AI, invited her to come speak at the event. She would be their “honorary contrarian speaker.” So she did. But more importantly, she spoke to the people who are trying to get a cut of the AI-dominated future. The result is immersively reported and somehow as entertaining as it is terrifying. (Well, almost.)
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounded by people who look and talk like me, all of us a little drunk but maintaining our nervous, manic professionalism. My moments of connection, by contrast, have been beyond language. Biking along the east edge of Prospect Park on an August night, hearing cicadas chant their reedy iambs, as loud on that stretch of Flatbush as they would be in the countryside, remembering summers of childhood, a house that’s gone, and my grandmother’s two-handed wave from the threshold.
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