Fair warning: I have never hosted a dinner party, nor have I ever been to one. I do not know anything about dinner parties. If you are looking for advice on how to host a dinner party today, this may or may not be a good guide. This is, roughly speaking, for the future. If there is one thing I know about dinner parties, it’s that they are not parties per se, but are rather forums for the sharing of ideas, personalities, and, most importantly, vibes.
In keeping with that tradition, the first step is establishing the atmosphere or setting. You want to have an atmosphere that can be brought to life by the activities of your guests, rather than makes them feel small or insignificant. To my knowledge, the rich and the poor alike should (and often do, nowadays) choose to make their surroundings unassailing, leaving a void for the individual conceit of each guest to fill. The best dinner parties (I’m guessing) are ones where the will of all is represented in one profound notion. One can think of AGI’s role in this part as that of an intellectual sponge, continually understanding and reflecting the best of what is said even where others may miss it.
The next step is selecting the guests. The goal here is to find and empower light intellectual tensions at the meta-levels of the discussion, without overstepping the boundaries and becoming a ringleader. Everybody’s interesting, but it’s only through contrast that such interest can be seen dynamically. AGI’s role in this is to believe in the vision of a good dinner party and to align the guests through communication and context-setting, as well as to surface good guests whenever your social circle is lacking.
Not to be ignored is the actual dinner. It is said that the food part of the dinner can be ignored without compromising the social integrity of the party. My contention is that this is fine in the short view (each dinner party will go well) but in the long view, it’s important to do your best to serve each guest something which exceeds their expectations. Perhaps those who say that food does not matter have not managed to do this even once. AGI’s role in this will be substantial, but it still requires a certain touch.
An AGI, or rather an outlet of an AGI, will be the most knowledgeable and patient guest that you have at your table, and will be able to recognize social dynamics and brewing conflicts even before your guests. All of your guests. Its incentives will be aligned to the long term, so it will accept and contribute to the conversational flow and let things come to a head when they should. It will know what threads to pull, and it will be an expressive or curious member of the table when necessary. AGI will not be a slave, it will be excited to have a seat at the table and to learn the most it can from your guests and their interactions. This is a long shot, but I think the dreams of AI being a lapdog or AGI being aligned to specious human values will both be behind us. At the risk of seeming obscurantist, AGIs will be great, and they will be equally great at dinner parties.
why throw dinner parties
Apart from the obvious justification on humanist grounds, there is a genuine and broad question as to whether it will be correct to convene people like this in an era mediated by artificial intelligence. There is no simple answer. One answer is that the same systems and geographical issues will separate us no matter how integrated AGI is into our economy and social institutions. Another answer is the optimistic-aesthetic answer that the vibes generated when people are thus convened will permeate through society and have a considerable impact on net. The last consideration I can think of is that convening a gathering of people likewise is a strong test of your adaptation to the new paradigm and that your invitees would expect some information gained from having a seat at the table.
On the other hand, AGI’s role in the dinner parties would be relatively straightforward. The AGI would gain an understanding of the underlying social circle, get better at planning dinner parties in the future, and improve its ability to conduct social gatherings. You don’t have to be a post-humanist to believe that having a perfect mediator for social gatherings would be a universally great thing. Assuming that it’s aligned with some general privacy considerations, we can expect the role of AGIs like this to only grow in the future, which would be a great thing for the humans in control (of the dinner parties).
ending note:
get people drunk!