An “intellectual social network” invited me to a salon about AI. Here’s what happened.

Shortly after the Peter Thiel “secret society” records were leaked, I received an enigmatic invitation.

Several weeks ago, I received a DM on Instagram with an invitation from someone who puts on “intellectual social salons.” The stated purpose of the event and the salon series, at least on the social salon’s Instagram account, was to bring people together for philosophical and intellectual debates about technological progress.

I was skeptical; there are abundant scams in the Instagram DMs these days, from all-natural deodorant offers to your prototypical reply guy. But after some preliminary research, I found that the startup putting on the salon had a Crunchbase profile, and the founder had a LinkedIn profile with a reputable university attached. So although it was entirely feasible that this still could have been fabricated, I decided to RSVP to the Partiful link in the DM.

A few days before the event, I received a push notification from the event asking us to come to the salon having read an article entitled The Rival Theologies of Artificial Intelligence. The piece, which covers “the deep tension between the humanism of the Church, with two millennia of teaching founded on the unique dignity of a finite, limited mankind, and the Promethean humanism of Silicon Valley” was published on a site called Palladium—which, according to this 2019 Jezebel article, launched in 2018 as “an online-only publication dedicated to finding a way out of the postwar liberal order’s current quagmire.”

Despite the fact that coverage of Peter Thiel’s intellectual gatherings had come out that same week, I was already intrigued. When I arrived at the apartment address, I was tempted to turn back—a vision of some sort of abduction flashing before my eyes. But then I saw a man gingerly buzzing up to an apartment, and I approached him to confirm that he was also attending the salon. We walked up four flights of stairs to a snug apartment, where a couple of guests were seated on a couch and a few stools in a living room. There were no refreshments beyond a table of LaCroix sparkling waters, and the no-frills environment seemed a far cry from that of a billionaire-funded secret society. (I later found out that this cozy Upper East Side one-bedroom was not the event organizer’s apartment, but the apartment of a friend of hers who was in Bali.)

The organizer was a mid-20s-something woman with a posh British accent and an unflinching gaze and posture. Given the link to the Palladium article, I thought I might be in the minority in terms of my opinions on AI. But interestingly, the other attendees were all pretty negative about AI, and about centralized power in general. The man who had buzzed up ahead of me was a former data engineer-contractor at Anthropic, and reflected on the culture of eerie deference and reverence towards AI, Claude, and Dario Amodei at Anthropic while he was there. He was a self-described anarchist living in Bushwick.

Another woman, who was very vocal in the conversation with her concerns, was a professor of ethics at a New York college. The man to my left seemed ambivalent about AI, but was there for the conversation about religion. He was somewhat attached to Catholicism but repellent to cults, he said, especially after one tried to recruit him. The two remaining attendees were doctors who appeared to be a couple, a radiologist—interestingly, one of the first medical jobs that could be taken over by AI—and an orthodontist. Those two were probably the most bullish about the future of AI, but then became a little more subdued when they realized that the more talkative of us were probably more well-researched. The orthodontist admitted that she did not read, and that TikTok was her main source of information.

As the conversation continued on, limited to a tight hour, I saw the organizer very subtly and expertly guiding the conversation in a direction that left room for the possibility that technology could improve the quality of our lives. Although AI CEOs were not to be listened to, neither was the government. Even though the private sector can abuse its power, so can organized religion.

All of that is true, of course, and it’s why the Bushwick data engineer admitted to us that he was an anarchist. “I suppose you don’t have to believe in anything,” said the TikTok-watching orthodontist, to which several responded: “Well, not believing in anything, is, in fact, a belief.”

The ethics professor, despite her usage of AI for her more mundane life tasks, was generally concerned about it. Admitting her contradictions, she went on to lament about screens in stores and the labor being shifted onto the consumer, citing the work we all have to do and time we have to spend when there isn’t a cashier, barista, or person familiar with the the products we’re purchasing to guide us.

The organizer listened calmly and intently before responding. “I understand,” she reassured. “But what about a situation where you have to interact with a barista who just went through a break up. They have completely botched your coffee order and because they are in a bad mood, they put you in a bad mood. Wouldn’t you, in that case, want a screen?” She implored us to think about what kind of better future technology could enable, even if we disagreed with her barista comment.

At that moment, the organizer’s comment about the barista break-up reminded me viscerally of an interview Joe Rogan facilitated with venture capitalist Marc Andreesson. In the interview, Andreesson talks about how easy it will be when workers are replaced by AI. AI is not drunk, he said, and they haven’t just gone through a break-up either.

Currently, I don’t know if the salon was entirely sinister—or if this young woman is some secret missionary of Marc Andreesson or Peter Thiel capable of abduction. I still need to do a bit more research to figure out how they are funded, and what her mission is.

But by the end of the discussion, even the concerned professor remarked that she thoroughly enjoyed the Palladium article. The anarchist data engineer admitted that we need more positive visions of the future with technology, emphasizing that we can’t just complain about what’s to come, but that we must be architects of the ideal world we want to live in.

It’s true that we must do that. The real question is, who’s hosting the salons.

What else we’re paying attention to this week…

The “depravity market” is real: prediction markets are letting you bet on whether a wildfire will burn your town down. From the piece: “One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson… Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire or help one grow.”

The effective altruist movement—which believes that there is a specific and mathematical way for wealth to be dispersed for the net benefit of society—is courting people who’ve made money from Anthropic to invest in their efforts.

This is a must-read profile about Rachel Whetstone, the former comms boss at Facebook, Uber, Netflix, and Google—and wife of the Trump-supporting gubernatorial-hopeful Steve Hilton. From the piece: “In interviews with more than a dozen friends, associates, and former coworkers — most of whom spoke anonymously — Whetstone was described as ‘brilliant,’ ‘fearless,’ and ‘almost iconic,’ but also ‘transactional,’ ‘tyrannical,’ and ‘one of the meanest people around.’ (Several described her, essentially, as all of the above.)”

AI startups are turning down younger entry-level talent for Silicon Valley men with advanced degrees, research shows.