Predictive Reasoning
The Death of Email
There’s a running joke in tech circles: once AI can write emails and another AI can summarize them, why involve humans at all? Your AI will just talk to my AI. Funny, but it’s not that far off.
What fascinates me is the idea of predictive reasoning underneath it. Right now I might write a long, thoughtful email because I want the person on the other end to feel a certain way or fully understand my intent. But theoretically, I don’t need to write the whole thing for the receiving AI to grasp what I’m saying.
Once both AIs have built a rich fingerprint of how we each communicate and the relationship between us, they can infer a tremendous amount from very little. My AI could send just ten words, and yours would unpack the full meaning using everything it knows about us.
It’s like code compression in programming. You shrink the function down to its essence, then expand it back when needed. If I ever want to read the actual exchange, I can just say “unpack this,” and the AI reconstructs it with all the nuance and tone it knows I’d use.
That raises some interesting questions:
- If AIs are predicting and expanding our intent, how do we know they’re not subtly changing the message?
- What does privacy look like when these systems build such detailed profiles of how we communicate with each person?
- Are we losing something valuable by removing the emotional craft of writing full emails, or does this free us for more meaningful human connections?
Personally, I think for day-to-day stuff, “close enough” is good enough. But for anything truly sensitive or high-stakes, we’ll probably step out of email entirely and talk in person or over the phone to confirm identities and intent. AI could otherwise take over everything, and we’d lose clarity on who actually said what.
The bigger point isn’t whether AI will handle our emails. It’s that the entire nature of digital communication is about to change, and we should start thinking about what that world actually looks like.
Kirill.
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ps. I just launched FolderMD, a Markdown reader/writer for your agents. Instead of squinting and reading 3,000 words inside a terminal, install Folder and your agents will know to write docs for you to review inside Folder. Keep your sanity, and your terminal output clean.
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