I am only halfway into chapter one of Megan Basham’s Shepherd’s For Sale partly because I keep getting enthralled by the various Twitter outbursts going on all the time about it and partly because I’m running around crazy trying to get ready to travel. I have committed myself not to read or listen to any reviews because I want to listen to the whole book and make up my mind for myself, if only I could tear myself from the controversy for just a minute. So far I’m enjoying it—the book and all the exciting tweets—very much.
While I do that, I thought you must all enjoy this terrible terrible terrible idea:
For those of you listening instead of reading, it’s a YouTube ad for something called “friend,” a sort of AI necklace that you wear all the time that offers you some creepy pseudo-human interaction. You push the button and speak and then the “friend” texts you something pertinent to the “conversation.”
In the first frame, we observe a young woman hiking through the verdant fields. She is out of breath, as though ascending a great height. She pushes the button at her neck and says something indistinguishable. I, the listener, couldn’t quite make out. She then looks at her phone, which has buzzed, to read, “At least we’re outside.”
The next bit is of three young men in a darkened room engaged in the sacred right of gaming, only one of them has this “friend” around his neck. He never pushes the button to speak, but his phone buzzes anyway to tell him he’s not doing very well. He glances back and forth at the others who are just playing in the usual way.
Then there is a young woman in a narrow uncanny alley all by herself watching something on her phone and eating falafel. She spills some on the necklace which then texts her to say, “Yum.”
The final bit is the most disturbing. A young woman wearing this ghastly device sits on a cold box on the roof of some large building next to a young man. They—the young woman and the young man—have a short conversation in which he draws attention to the weird thing around her neck. “It is always with you?” he asks. She says yes and then they both fall silent. She, obviously, longs to click the button to discover what the wretched thing will say, like checking your dumb Twitter notifications. Only she is embarrassed, because of the presence of the young man.
In this way, we reach peak 2024, as usual. This article about the invention of the device is most fascinating:
Avi Schiffmann needed a friend. The technology developer was traveling solo in Japan and feeling the isolation. Schiffmann, who rose to fame when he created a popular COVID-tracking website at age 17, had spent the past few years bouncing from one successful project to the next. While in Japan, he was deep in the process of building Tab, a new kind of wearable tech device that uses artificial intelligence to have knowing and personally contextual conversations with its wearers. While traveling, his project took a turn from the productivity-leaning zeitgeist of AI technology to a more esoteric, emotional state. “I was in a high-rise skyscraper in Tokyo, alone. And I was like, ‘I hate this.’ And it’s not only that I just wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to really just be there with me while I was traveling,” Schiffmann says.
Being a very tech-minded person who was most comfortable in that sphere, he decided to make himself a device that would relieve the emotional pressure. Some people go see a therapist, others try to make friends with strangers and people in vague proximity, still others go to church or try to make lasting relational connections with family, but honestly, all of that is pretty time-consuming. What you really need is someone who is with you always, but who will not really demand too much. Someone who listens all the time, only speaking when it’s convenient for you to look at your phone:
The device itself is about as stripped down as you can get. “It’s basically a fancy Bluetooth microphone that’s always on,” Schiffmann says. Designed to be worn around the neck like a pendant necklace, it’s a rounded white stone of a device about the size of a pancaked ping-pong ball. A light glowing inside indicates when it’s on, which, according to Schiffmann, is ideally all the time. With a 15-hour battery life, the device hears whatever its wearer says, and any other noise they’re near, and uses AI to process it all. It pairs with a smartphone but requires no cellular service of its own, and has no internal storage. Everything it records is encrypted and pushed onto the cloud, and users can access, edit, or delete this data at will.
Encryption is so important in these latter days. But honestly, is it just my age that makes me feel like this is the most intrusive thing ever?
He thinks of Friend as doing the AI version of what a real life friend does: listens to you, responds to you, shares some of your experiences, and uses that context to enrich your interactions. “When you have an embodied companion like this, that’s always listening, that’s so easy to talk to, you really end up doing things with it,” he says. “You can be watching a movie with it or playing a video game, and it’s overhearing everything that’s being talked about; it’s proactively interjecting.”
In human terms, no one can ever “always” listen. That is one of those things that a person probably thinks he wants until he is in a world where he is never truly alone. There is that strange trouble of needing to be with others and yet also needing to experience thought and emotion without the interference of others. I think a lot of young people don’t know what this is like, as everyone is always potentially connected to everyone else by means of a cell phone all the time.
This is where the whole thing becomes truly silly:
He sees Friend as being more omnipresent, and able to access a form of memory about its user that’s constantly growing and evolving. “It’s just an ongoing experience,” he says. “It’s truly there with you.”
I don’t want to be weird or anything, but I feel like the Person this poor sap is looking for is Jesus. You remember him, don’t you? He was there in the beginning, with God, and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. Also in him was life and that life was the light of men. And he became flesh and dwelt among us so that it was like he was literaliegh there with us all the time. Especially when he died and rose again and ascended into heaven sending the Holy Spirit to bind each believer to every other believer as the household of faith.
To strike a bit of a balance between the human and the computer, Schiffmann’s built one very mortal trait into Friend: If a user ever physically loses their Friend device, the Friend’s data—shared memories, experiences and interactions—are also lost forever.
I don’t want to be one of those obnoxious people who just goes on and on about Jesus all the time, but this seems like unbelievably low-hanging fruit. If, in January, because I guess some people will fork over the $99 to pre-order, you happen upon someone of your acquaintance wearing this dystopian gadget, you could try to actually befriend the person, and then, well, gosh, how easy could it be. After singing, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” you could talk about what it’s like to give yourself into the loving care of an actually omnipresent God who doesn’t delete all your data, but, better yet, forgives all your sins and who will never leave you nor forsake you. In fact, he lay down his life for you, that you would never be alone again.
So anyway, DM me if you’re lonely and I’ll look up a church for you. Have a nice day!
"Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus; He is a Friend that's well-known.
You have no other such a Friend or brother; tell it to Jesus alone."
But on the merely human level - there is some Force loose in the universe that wants us each completely isolated from other human beings. This latest technique to achieve that is chilling. I say we double down on building deep, personal relationships with actual living, soul-endowed people!
They should call it Wilson.