Always On: Preparing to Live in the Age of Ubiquitous AI

We have to start wrestling with what it will be like when AI is ubiquitous and omnipresent.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced that you can now connect ChatGPT Team accounts to Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. This allows ChatGPT to access any and all information you have stored in those platforms. The benefit is that you will be able to use ChatGPT in all sorts of new ways, connecting dots, finding patterns, making you more efficient, etc. But it also means that ChatGPT will have access to any and all information you have stored in those platforms.

Think about that for a second. I’ve been using Google Drive in various ways for more than a decade, personally and professionally. It’s not my primary platform, but I’ve spent plenty of time there and have produced, shared and received countless documents over the years. Do I know everything that’s in there? Absolutely not. Will ChatGPT? 100%.

For Sam Altman’s vision of AI as a “life advisor” to come true, ChatGPT’s tentacles will need to extend into every corner of your life. First Google Drive, then GMAIL, then all of your many, many accounts, facilitated by the potential new “Sign in with ChatGPT” functionality.

It’s not just ChatGPT of course. “Ambient” AI is taking off in hospital exam rooms around the world. For those unfamiliar, it’s using recording devices, tied directly to electronic medical records, to record clinician/patient interactions, summarize them, and capture key points and next steps. It reduces the administrative burden on the clinician, which is a good thing, but how does it change the dynamic of what happens in the exam room? Are there topics patients won’t talk openly about if they know an AI is capturing every word? Will the fact that a conversation is knowingly being recorded change the relationship between clinician and patient? Probably. But how? Who knows.

It goes beyond the exam room. When OpenAI purchased Jony Ives’ AI hardware company a couple weeks ago, they said the goal is to create devices that capture all aspects of our lives so the AI can benefit us in new and more powerful ways.

Knowing Ives’ design aesthetic, whatever they’re working on will be beautiful, sleek, and subtle. In other words, you may not know someone is wearing one. Maybe it’s a pendant attached to a lapel. Or a pair of glasses where you have to look really closely to notice the tiny red blinking light telling you you’re being recorded.

What does this “always on” world look like? How do we consent to having interactions recorded? Can we forcibly stop someone from recording interactions with us? What about all the sticky parts of life that we don’t want an AI knowing about – can those be edited out?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. But the time is now for us to start asking and trying to answer them. We need to have conversations with each other, with ethicists, philosophers, technologists, religious leaders, counselors, bartenders, and anyone else who knows what human interaction looks like. Because these changes are on their way – and in some cases already here – and they promise to fundamentally change the way we interact with each other.

The first step? Apparently it’s verifying our humanity. Then we can get down to the hard work of figuring out what all of this means.