We Owe It to Ourselves to Shun These People Mercilessly

If you wear this gadget around your neck I do not think you should have a place in society.

YouTube/Friend

Silicon Valley trends come and go: crypto, driverless cars, the “Internet of Things.” While they are hot, they make money for a lot of people. Some of them are smart, some stupid, and some evil. Most are some mixture of all three.

Sometimes, these people produce technology that moves the world forward. The technology we now live with has, in many ways, ensured the highest quality of life the human race has ever known. The fear, however, is that the tech world’s frequently uninhibited greed will eventually outweigh the societal gains it promises, as more and more half-baked or morally dubious products flood the market, funneling money into the pockets of cynical people whose vision of the future only extends to insulating themselves from any consequences of their creations. In short: these assholes are going to make regular society a fucked-up dystopia and brush it all off while living on private islands or whatever.

The latest of these trends is AI. AI, broadly speaking, is a catch-all term for new applications of machine-learning algorithms that have been strengthened by the power of modern computer chips. It can do all sorts of things that these algorithms were doing before, like process text or speech input and answer basic questions, as well as some other new flashy tricks like creating stupid images of what Emmanuel Macron would look like if he were also Kermit the Frog. A friend of mine did this recently and I hated it.

I hate all of AI, really, in a profound and deep way that I tried to articulate in a blog earlier this year and find myself reiterating now. I hate it because most of it is a scam, I hate it because the things it creates look bad, and I hate it because very stupid people think that it is going to take my job someday—which it might, but only by replacing what I and other writers do with something far stupider and blander and devoid of life or artistry or feeling.

Most of all, though, I hate it because many of its current applications prey on human insecurities to make money with little regard for the future they will create. We know that we are in a new era of technology: social media and constant connection and an unceasing flood of minable and sellable and exploitable data. Everyone is struggling with this. I keep my Instagram public as it is sometimes a useful tool for a journalist with a semi-public profile. Other times I worry that someone who doesn’t like a thing that I’ve written will use it to spam me with dreck and abuse, or worse. Children are bullied in school for what they post online. The elderly have their savings and pensions vaporized because they clicked on a link in an email sent from continents away. Falsified videos of political candidates ignite controversies and inspire conspiracies.

All of this is overwhelming and isolating. Digital spaces are less familiar and more hostile than the physical ones many people are used to. Major publications and researchers claim that there is an “epidemic of loneliness” affecting society. Some of them claim that tech is the problem; the tech world claims that it is the solution.

Now, one company says that it is making an elegant solution for all this: a robot that is your Friend.

Does this ad horrify you a little bit? If not, then you are a mark. It’s clearly meant to be a little dystopian, a little self-referential to the fact that what it is selling purports to be something out of a sad sci-fi movie (this is just Her all over again, like every AI chatbot). It horrifies me a little bit, but most of all it makes me angry.

This product is basically an AI chatbot that you take around with you. Its most likely practical application is as a more sophisticated version of the Lifealert pendants elderly people have had for decades, but a company can’t simply say that. They have to pretend it is the cure for social isolation like it is an advancement in consumer technology that changes the interior and emotional lives of the people who use it.

Gadgets do not do this. They will never, ever do this. Relationships change people, experiences change people, people change people. Dongles do not. Anyone who claims that they do is a huckster and a fraud, yet this is what most of modern society’s technological output is geared towards.

To be fair, Friend’s founder doesn’t seem to be particularly subtle about this fact. He spent the vast majority of his initial funding on securing the domain name friend dot com, which makes sense, as his actual product probably isn’t much more than a scaled-down Raspberry Pi that can send you text messages. I doubt it costs much to produce. The people involved in this shit are barely trying anymore, and it’s still working. Look! A largely complimentary Wired piece on Friend! A piece that directly notes that almost all of the AI companion wearable projects thus far have turned out to be useless duds, and then says, credulously, “Schiffmann wants the Friend to be something very different,” because the founder told them that he’s not trying to make it a productivity tool.

The anger this makes me feel is difficult to describe. As we’ve seen with every stupid fad that has come out of the tech boom of the past decade, it is almost impossible to shame people away from trends in the short term. But it is possible to keep them confined to subcultures. If we do this to AI it will be a good step.

I want the little AI shitheads to be widely recognized as their own strange thing, to be shunned on dating apps, to be looked at by normal literate people as gamblers and marks, as (I think) is largely the perception of crypto bros these days. In my heart, of course, I desire an even worse end for them, one I cannot put on this page, but shame seems like a good step. I think we get there by no longer taking them at their word, by ruthlessly scrutinizing the actual product that they’ve created. We should say what it does and what it does not do and what those functions will change about the way we interact with the world. We should consider the damage they can cause instead of just fantasizing about the good that they will do.

Critics have been harping on and on about this for years when it comes to the tech world and its media apparatus, and yet things like Friend still come along with great fanfare. We must nip this in the bud by any means necessary: rhetorical or political or physical. Cloud computing still must store its data in physical locations, vulnerable to physical threats in the same way oil pipelines are. These people are not our friends.