Superhuman charisma is coming, and will be tremendously fun and interesting and cause lots of problems

With the recent math-pocalipse on everyone’s minds, and writing code by hand well a thing of the past, it is natural to wonder what domains frontier AI models will find superhuman ability in next. “Unsurprisingly” models have made progress most quickly in domains where reinforcement learning is cheap- areas where we have high-quality and rapid verification. This makes sense, because of how models are trained. So the question becomes what domains, after math and coding, have sufficient reinforcement and verification mechanisms, as well as sufficient importance, to both warrant and enable large scale training runs. Here I make the case for people skills. The first thing that I want to note is that people skills are surprisingly rules based. As any book on manipulation will tell you, being charming and personable isn’t some effervescent quality that only a select few can hope to achieve. Rather, doing a number of specific things has a strong effect on how people perceive you- smiling when they look at you, asking them questions about themselves, nodding along. Body language is similarly simple- various postures of openness, mimicking behavior (to a point), etc. These are essentially e