Message in a Bottle: Social Engineering & AI

I've been thinking for a long time about how AI could actually revolutionize social media.

I use AI to help me think through and write some of the things I post on social media, and the combination, at least personally, is very rewarding, but i feel that there is a fundamental problem with how social media works today and that is it's linear progression over time.

Posting is a bit like a stranded survivor throwing a bottle containing a message into the wide blue ocean.

You write something you care about.

You throw it into the feed.

Maybe someone sees it.

Maybe they don't.

Social media is extraordinarily good at distributing content widely.

It is much less good at finding people of a similar mindset.

People complain that AI separates people and so I've wondered for a long time whether AI could change that by becoming a

matchmaker at a distance.

Imagine that everyone has an AI companion that knows them reasonably well. Not just what they post publicly, but their interests, temperament, sense of humour, conversational style, what kinds of people they enjoy, what environments they find comfortable and what kinds of social situations they struggle with.

With permissions, those AIs could communicate with one another.

But they wouldn't simply exchange dossiers.

They could exchange useful abstractions about their users and look for possibilities.

Because compatibility isn't just:

"These two people like the same things."

It's much more complicated than that.

I once met a woman who invited me back to her house. With trepidation I agreed. I would have suggested going somewhere more neutral, but I didn't want to look like a coward either. I was wondering if she knew what we were walking into. When we got there, there was a big group of family and friends sitting around, and there were people from the local scene present who I had heard of and recognized. I just sat there and looked on feeling uncomfortable.

I just didn't belong in that environment and I had no interest in even trying.

This wasn't necessarily a problem between her and me because we got on fine.

It was a problem of environment.

A good AI matchmaker would need to understand that distinction.

It might recognize that two people could get along very well but that throwing one person directly into the other's social bubble would be a terrible first move.