Austen Allred, CEO@Bloomtech, reported a handful of lines comedian John Mulaney used when he closed out the San Francisco conference for Salesforce last week:
“If Al is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
He added, “Can Al sit there in a fleece vest? Can Al not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”
“Let me get this straight. You’re hosting a ‘future of Al’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?” Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host – Salesforce – and the audience sitting right in front of him.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,'” Mulaney said.
“What’s important here is that we’re looking for solutions,” he said sarcastically. “And in looking for solutions, what we’re really after is insights, which then lead to success. Now, start prepping the humans for robots.”
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” he continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
The comedian rounded out his Dreamforce appearance by thanking attendees “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
Mulaney then shared an anecdote about how he and his son, who is nearly 3, like to play baseball in their front yard. “We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”