He was surrounded by seven staff from the world's leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill's view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

If you are interested in reaching customers that you can't get to now, in offering user experiences that go beyond the rigid orchestration of the point and click paradigm, in providing just the right data that someone needs, it may be time to consider creating a chatbot. When I ran across the description of Colin Megill's course for O'Reilly Media about how to build your own chatbot (which is starting on July 13), I thought of Eliza, one of the pioneering chatbots that did a serviceable job of parsing sentences and tossing them back to you. Eliza made it seem like you were having a conversation if you got lucky. If you said something it couldn't handle, the conversation quickly got dull or non-sensical. The world has grown up.