We hosted an event for New Yorkers curious about AI. Here's who showed up.
From disillusioned tech workers to psychiatrists, people were searching for community and meaning outside of their jobs and the tech sector.
Everyone in New York City is talking about two things: the New York Knicks, and AI.
On Tuesday morning, as I was finishing up some writing at a local cafe before heading to the France v. Senegal World Cup game at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, I ran into a neighborhood friend who is a documentary maker. Unprompted, he began telling me about the conversations he was having with Claude about quantum entanglement. He was astounded by Claude’s intelligence and depth of knowledge, how it responded to his very specific questions about stars collapsing onto themselves.
We had to cut it short so I could make the game, surrounded by the collective energy of fellow soccer (and some basketball) fans wearing blue, yellow, orange, and orange; an amalgamation of French, Senegalese, and Knicks colors. After the game, I took a series of exorbitantly priced New Jersey Transit trains back to Manhattan, and then to Brooklyn’s Sofreh, a Persian restaurant that boasts spiced meats and jeweled rice as well as a saffron and rosewater ice cream. This is where we at Hard Reset were hosting an intimate dinner for New Yorkers interested in talking about emerging tech, their workplaces, and AI’s role in New York City.
Across conversations, there were a few themes: one was how tech used to be a space for unique problem-solving, yet now is a gold rush for 25-year-olds without care for the repercussions of what they’re making. Another had to do with the problems within tech workplaces themselves.
One woman at the dinner had unionized two of her previous workplaces, and at one of those (seemingly progressive) workplaces, she was subsequently forced onto medical leave. She spoke of issues at the current startup that she worked for, a mental health platform, citing the impossibility of addressing mental health issues when systemic issues are underpinning a lot of mental health issues. Another attendee was a former director at a retail investment tech platform seeking more meaning in her career, while a third works in civic reform and runs a Substack that connects people to public sector jobs.
I was seated across from two psychiatrists, who found Hard Reset through Instagram and attended the dinner because they are seeing so many patients coming to their hospital with AI psychosis. One patient, they told me, arrived at the hospital announcing that he was the King of England, referring to physicians and hospital staff as the “subjects” of his kingdom, and confidently stating that an AI chatbot told him he should seek political asylum.
Yet because AI-prompted psychosis is a new psychological frontier—not in line with usual forms of psychosis, because the AI conversations are actually real conversations—the psychiatrists are still figuring out the best way to treat and medicate people, outside of antipsychotics or other methods they might normally use to treat patients.
Meanwhile, one economic development worker spoke of a desire to have the state increase its capacity for innovation in the public sector, while a woman with an online security platform told me of a partnership she was working on with FIFA to preempt and detect human trafficking at the World Cup, where huge crowds can lend themselves to people being moved for malicious reasons. We actually ended the night not even talking about tech at all, but about our favorite animals and our rationales for why: coyotes, elephants, cats, and whales.
The next day, one of the attendees shared a note with our event organizer, expressing a desire to talk not just of doom and gloom in tech, but of “hope” for workers—how we navigate ambiguity, transformation, and AI insanity realistically without losing inspiration for the future.
Which brings me back, actually, to the Knicks, the World Cup, and late-night dinner conversations. While The Knicks and AI could not be more different—one may keep us glued to a screen conversation with an LLM, understanding ourselves as the monarch of another country; the other has us joyfully parading in the streets, in celebration of a team of phenomenally athletic real-life human beings—I think it makes a ton of sense that these two conflicting forces and feelings are co-existing. We are inherently social beings, and while technology will play a role in how we communicate, perceive the world, and interface with public and private services necessary to existence, community and joy will have a magnetic pull like never before.
Gathering in-person to talk about it may be the first step to balancing it all out—and this, honestly, gives me hope.
What else I’m paying attention to:
Morale at Meta is “the worst it’s ever been” according to their CTO, so they’re looking to make things better with…snacks?
Anthropic is hiring a Head of Creative and Copy for the casual salary of $400,000.
WIRED shares a list of names of people attending Peter Thiel’s secret society “Dialog.” The topics of conversation include how to “build-a-cult,” “money does buy happiness,” and World War III—and you better believe that there is an affiliated matchmaking app.
Uber and Lyft routinely charge different amounts for the same exact rides, according to a monthslong investigation from journalists at Consumer Reports, who did a similar investigation into Instacart’s algorithmic pricing.
New York Times White House reporter Maggie Hagerman’s new book includes texts from Trump that mock tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos for fawning over him.
The U.S.’s largest insurer plans to sink $3 billion into AI in the next two years, with AI agents calling doctors, reading charts out loud, and scheduling patients.
Norway is imposing a near ban of generative AI in elementary schools.
Conservatives are planning a “national day of protest” against AI data centers (as we wrote about next week, dislike of data centers may be uniting people across party lines).