“Ideas are like rabbits,” John Steinbeck once remarked. “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
So true! During our first Ideas Club gathering, thoughts were hopping, leaping, and twirling around the room, proliferating like the proverbial bunnies. Everybody was jumping into the conversation, the way you do at the best kind of dinner parties, when a topic takes on a life of its own, and all the guests are leaning forward, listening eagerly, chiming in with their own observations, building on one another’s comments. It was even better than I’d hoped.
For new readers, I’ll explain that I borrowed (OK, stole) the whole concept from the Aqus Cafe in Petaluma, California.
John Crowley grew up in his grandfather’s Irish pub outside Dublin and wanted the same congenial feel in his Aqus Café.
Owner John Crowley has created a cozy gathering space where he hosts neighborhood dinners, conversation groups, poetry readings, musical evenings, and anything else that will bring people together in fellowship. I realized I was looking at real community building — and an effective antidote to the epidemic of loneliness we hear so much about.
My ears really perked up when he started telling me about Donna Benedetti’s new Watershed Community. He called it “an ideas club. It’s like a book club, only instead of books, you discuss ideas. They send out a few magazine articles to read, and you all get together and talk about them.”
Brilliant! No need to slog through a book you don’t love (or maybe actively loathe) just for the pleasure of a chat with your circle.
Rich and I attended the Watershed Community’s August gathering which included plenty of time in small discussion groups, so everyone had a chance to be heard and get to know one another in a convivial atmosphere.
And I walked out thinking, “Yes! I could do this! I could build community this way.”
My plan, which Donna supported wholeheartedly, was to launch our Ideas Club in San Anselmo, the California village where Rich and I spend six months every year. However, we were on the verge of departing for Spain, where we live the rest of the time, so launching the Ideas Club would have to wait until spring.
Or would it?
“Hey, you know what…?” Rich said, after we’d settled into our Seville apartment. “We could start one here.”
To find the right spot for the Ideas Club, Rich and I selflessly tested every coffee house, tapas bar, gastropub, and tavern in our Seville neighborhood. And picked this one. Photo: Janie Murphy
Rich and I began floating the idea with various friends and found there was keen interest. But where to hold it?
As it happened, Fernando, owner of a tiny neighborhood gastropub, had just bought a nearby cocktail and tapas bar called Maldito. He agreed to open early for us, asking only that we encourage participants to eat and drink heartily. Knowing my friends, I assured him that wouldn’t be a problem.
Our theme was the future of artificial intelligence. And who doesn’t have a lot to say about that?
Whenever I ran into friends who were coming, I got an earful in advance about everything from the convenience of using ChatGPT for vacation planning to the horrors of seductive AI programs getting entirely too personal and then assisting you to commit suicide, even murder. (Oh yes, it’s happened.)
Clearly we weren’t going to have to work too hard to keep the conversational ball rolling. Still, we sent out some short articles and a TED Talk as background. And we explained someone in each small group would serve as a prompter, keeping the conversation on track, while another would be the scribe, jotting down key points to read aloud at the end.
In the unlikely event people needed more stimulus, I prepared a list of questions such as “How do you feel about self-driving cars? Would you get in a plane piloted by AI?” These were tucked into envelopes and placed on each table; each group would choose whether to open theirs.
I got to Maldito early, bringing notebooks, pens, envelopes with questions, name tags, and markers. We were ready to roll!
One group opened their envelope. But those at my table were too busy to bother, caught up in a discussion of how AI is like the wild, wild West: a lawless new frontier. Or as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it, “enormous horsepower but no steering wheel.”
I mentioned that last year, while writing about the artificial intelligence boom in San Francisco, I’d stumbled across the worrying fact that AI was predicted to replace 800 million human jobs by 2030. Although I use ChatGPT rarely — mostly just to fuel snarky remarks on this blog — I decided to ask it whether I should be concerned.
ChatGPT replied, “While there are risks and challenges associated with AI development, it is possible to harness the benefits of AI while mitigating potential risks.” Great! How? “Through responsible development, ethical governance, and collaborative efforts to ensure that AI serves the common good.”
So all we need to do is control corporate greed, elect honest politicians, and find a way for humanity to work together in harmony. How hard could that be?
On the positive side, we talked about advances in medicine, science, and self-driving taxis (which I love!). We reminded ourselves that when faced with other potentially devastating inventions, humanity got together and created the nuclear proliferation treaty, international controls on human genetic manipulation, and ozone layer recovery.
“Unfortunately in the last few months,” said technologist Tristan Harris in his TED talk, “we’re seeing clear evidence of many frontier AI models that will lie and scheme when they’re told that they’re about to be retrained or replaced, and find a way maybe they should copy their own code outside the system. We’re seeing AIs … cheat in order to win.”
Newsweek reported on a study demonstrating that — hypothetically — AI “would be willing to kill humans in order to prevent itself from being replaced.” Yikes!
Someone asked, “But we can just shut down AI, right?”
If only. Here’s how Medium put it:
“Many advanced AI systems function in autonomous or decentralized environments, making such an approach ineffective. AI operates across drones, cloud servers, and distributed neural networks, meaning a single “off switch” is often absent. Even when a shutdown mechanism exists, an AI optimized for a specific goal may actively resist deactivation if it perceives shutdown as an obstacle to completing its task.”
Despite some dystopian moments, the group said the evening’s conversation left them feeling more positive about AI. And they seemed to enjoy the fellowship, lingering to chat afterwards.
My take? The Ideas Club is off to a rip-roaring start, building community, providing lots of food for thought. I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next month.
Afterwards Rich said, “Hey, you know what, that actually worked!”
I’ve written a lot lately about making a conscious choice to improve your social life by moving abroad. But you can also up your game by building community wherever you are right now, and starting your own Ideas Club is a great first step. You can enrich friendships, have fun, learn stuff, and live the words of John Steinbeck:
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
And that is something that AI can never, ever really understand.
OK, so maybe they’re more like us than we think?
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