Your new "friend" -- You knew this AI device would show up

In the age of Chat sermon helpers, maybe digital priests loom somewhere in the future?

Well, it’s Labor Day — which I will spend (for the most part) laboring.

In other words, here is a quick post before I run out the door to jump into a packed car and head north for another step in the complicated process of low-budget moving. Did you know that books are not the only physical object in the world that gets heavier when you are 70-something?

This is not the day for me to wade into my file of notes from the Jonathan Haidt interview. I can’t do a quick post on that, since I want to do more to react to that material than a simple cut-and-paste post. Frankly, I am still thinking through the material about the whole “ degradation” factor in screens culture. Remember this post the other day? The one with this headline:

Jonathan Haidt's warnings for spiritual leaders

Here's your first reading assignment: "On The Degrading Effects of Life Online"

Then there is the whole “dopamine” factor in this drama, the idea that the gods of social-media and video games are using the human body’s chemistry to push young people on and on and on, changing the state of their minds one click after another.

Scary stuff. And speaking of scary stuff, I have been sitting on a recent offering from Anne “Demotivations With Anne” Kennedy with this headline: “Dystopian Besties — What a Friend we have in Chat.”

If you speak fluent evangelical, you will immediately get the whole “What a Friend we have …” thing that she did there.

Yes, if you grew up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when lots of folks were reading “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey, this “Dystopian Besties” piece would leave you thinking about equations involving the number “666.”

In other words, what happens if AI turns into another form of technology that raises the moral ceiling really high and also lowers the moral floor way, way down into the danger zone? Yes, AI has tremendous potential for good. While I am not a “Terminator” franchise fan, I have read enough interviews with thoughtful tech visionaries to also know that AI could be very dangerous.

OK, but what about the potential for AI to help people escape the growing cloud of loneliness and anxiety that hovers over our culture? Here is a key chunk of Kennedy’s post, referring to the video that I embedded up at the top of this post:

… 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.

As we say all the time during the Divine Liturgy: “Lord have Mercy.”

In this case, I think that I had better make that Lord! Have! Mercy!

Kennedy points readers to a Fast Company feature by Nate Berg offering some details of this new AI counselor-friend device. It describes how a tech-developer named Ava Schiffmann had a moment of inspiration during a lonely trip to Japan — leading to the whole idea of creating an AI buddy.

You will be stunned to learn that this device is linked to the user’s omnipresent smartphone:

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.

Users can talk to it directly by touching the light on the device, and the AI will immediately respond via a text message sent to the user’s phone. It can also send messages unprompted based on what it hears, and what it’s learned by listening to its wearer over time. “The more you talk to it, the more you build up a relationship with it. And that’s really the whole goal of the product,” Schiffmann says.

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.

I think that’s enough of that, for now.

It’s really hard not to think of how this kind of tech could drift into religious life, especially in flocks suffering from a shortage of clergy. I mean, we are already in the age of AI programs — think SermonSpark — that help busy preachers find a bit of help in the pulpit (some churches still have pulpits, methinks).

Oh, and does anyone remember the online Holy Communion debates during the coronavirus pandemic? At least this headline, from one of my “On Religion” columns, focused on high-tech temptations facing real, analog clergy: “Anglican debate in 2020 — Can clergy consecrate bread and win over the Internet?”

Let’s go there. If someone can purchase an AI “friend,” what about an AI “priest” that is — of course — programmed by the ecclesiastical authorities in a specific religious tradition? Can the Chat priest offer church-approved advice in times of need? Could your AI priest (let’s assume that, through the “cloud,” it’s linked to actual clergy somewhere) hear your confessions? And then what?

That’s enough, for now. I think I’ll go for a drive in the mountains, even if that involves some labor on Labor Day.

Be safe, everyone.

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.

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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.