A Commitment to People

So much of the conversation about AI’s future seems limited to predictions. Who will lose their jobs. Which industries will be disrupted. Bitcoin will soar. The dollar will fall. Chaos will ensue. The predictions vary wildly, but they share an assumption: that humanity’s fate is in the hands of the machines, or the fates, or the gods… but it’s certainly not ours to decide.

Let’s make a distinction. John F. Kennedy did not predict that America would put a man on the moon within a decade. In 1990, an international consortium didn’t predict the human genome would be sequenced within 15 years. Predictions are for placing bets on the future; commitments direct focus and energy.

Here’s our belief: The connection a human feels with another human cannot be replicated by a computer, no matter how personable or emotionally intelligent that computer becomes. And, here’s a pretty sure bet: AI models of the future will be more emotionally intelligent than we are. They will read micro-expressions, track vocal patterns, detect stress and deception and grief, and integrate it into a knowledge base that no human can match.

But emotional intelligence is not connection.

That response—the moment when someone feels genuinely heard by another person—is not a feature to be optimized. It’s at the core of what makes human societies work.

So, here’s our commitment for the phase of development we are calling Interim Solomon—probably the next year or so: there will be domain experts in the loop for any aspects outside the core system, and the core system itself will be designed with “escalation gates” that bring mediators or other relationship professionals back into the interaction at points of impasse or other identified inflection points.

A brief aside on a related topic: we can imagine a Solomon Academy where attorneys, healthcare professionals, and others are trained on the Solomon platform. This is not only practical from the standpoint of Solomon’s continued popular acceptance and growth, it also foots with a view of the future in which people are retrained as “relationship experts” in a world where much of today’s knowledge work has been taken over by AI.