Monday’s final presentation was perhaps the most unusual one of the day in that it focused more on feelings than technology.
Attendees were told to pick a fellow attendee next to them and talk for three minutes, sharing details about their lives. The point, moderator and dating coach Joyce Zhang explained, was to encourage people to share what others wouldn’t necessarily know about them. Two more sessions of this followed over the next hour.
The presentation, dubbed Human Connection in the Age of AI, was geared toward how attendees dealt with each other. Dr. Carole Robin, a Stanford distinguished teacher and co-founder of Leaders in Tech, said AI could augment human contact, but should never replace it.
“I suspect I’m not the only panelist who has pretty strong feelings about that,” she told the crowd.
“I believe with every fiber of my being that human beings are still going to want to connect with other human beings, that people do business with people. Sometimes they’ll do business with an AI. Sometimes an AI will do business with another AI. But sooner or later, people are going to continue to do business with people at the most core levels.”
Fellow panelist Raza Habib, a technical staff member at Anthropic, agreed, up to a point.
“I think there’s actually an incredible opportunity for better mental health and well-being,” he said. “These models can actually be the better angels on our shoulders; they can be coaches, they can help us.”
Judging from the number of people who stayed after the presentation talking to their seatmates, the experiment was a success for some. Developers are sometimes typecast as a curmudgeonly lot more comfortable with computers, but as Monday showed, there are a lot of people who enjoy a chat, too.