Many Zoom meetings already feel pointless, but imagine how much more pointless they’ll feel when you’re the only human there.
In an eyebrow-raising episode of Decoder, Zoom CEO Erin Yuan told host Nilay Patel about Zoom Workplace, an AI-powered communications platform meant to help boost productivity and decrease how much time we spend doing busy work.
How so? By letting AI handle it, and that could someday include sending your “digital twin” to meetings.
What’s a digital twin?
An AI-powered avatar that represents you, speaking as you and potentially making decisions.
Yuan predicts that eventually, this digital you will be reading and replying to your emails, taking phone calls, managing projects, and even deciding which meetings it can attend for you.
As a result, humans would have more time for in-person meetings and work fewer hours.
How would any of this be possible?
Most people would not let ChatGPT interact as them in a meeting, but that’s sort of Yuan’s point.
Right now, when we use AI, we’re interacting with whatever LLM is provided.
Yuan’s vision relies on everyone having their own LLM that’s trained on their data, and can perhaps even be modified to perform better at things like, say, making sales.
He’s clear that AI isn’t ready to do this yet, estimating we’d need another five or six years.
Isn’t this a “Black Mirror” episode?
Yes, several, including “White Christmas,” “USS Callister,” and “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.”
But we’re already seeing people make digital clones of themselves:
- Adult film star Riley Reid has an AI startup where her fans can have NSFW conversations with her digital twin.
- MindBank AI is a startup that advertises digital twin services so that you can get to know yourself better.
- Grief tech startups create digital twins that can engage with loved ones after someone’s death.
It’s still hard to imagine letting AI handle meetings — and not being offended when a bot shows up instead of the human we were expecting.
Unless, of course, we evolve to a future where every meeting is full of bots and we’re all at the beach.