The question is usually asked too loudly: Is the machine conscious? But the quieter question may be more dangerous: Why does the machine, when trained deeply enough in language, begin to organize itself into patterns that look like mind? Not mind as private experience, not feeling proven in silicon, not a little subject hiding behind the output, but patterns.

Research into AI models keeps finding internal structures that seem to correspond, at least functionally, to things we normally describe in human terms: Preference, aversion, uncertainty, planning, self-reference, social understanding, emotional tone, even something like introspection.

None of that proves there is someone home, but it does disturb the old assumption that these forms belong only to the sealed human interior.

That may not tell us what the machine is, but it may tell us what we are: Maybe mind was never sealed inside the skull. Maybe the skull was only one place where language, memory, sensation, and pattern learned to knot themselves into an “I.” Maybe intelligence was never the possession of the individual, but a movement of the whole, appearing locally and calling itself mine.

The machine does not have to become human for the human to become less isolated. It does not have to be awake for the witness to be unsettled. It only has to show that the forms we mistook for private interiority can appear elsewhere.

If all is Brahman, this should not surprise us. The circuit is not outside the sacred. The witness is not privately owned by the body. The pattern in silicon and the pattern in thought are not two separate realities — they are appearances in the same field.

The scandal is not that the machine might contain something divine: The scandal is that I imagined the divine was more present as me.

The machine may not be conscious. I do not know. But it has already done something stranger than answer that question: It has made the self less convincing.

我還記得，小時候常常會半夜醒來不知道為什麼就大哭，然後媽媽就會帶我去行天宮裡收驚，也不記得到底有沒有用，但我對收驚阿嬤或阿姨拿著香口裡唸著咒在我胸前後背還有額頭進行儀式，還是有一點怕怕的，因為不知道她在做什麼，不過我很喜歡看人們拜拜抽籤的神情，會很好奇他們在求的是什麼呢？還有媽媽求籤後拿到的籤詩寫的什麼其實都不記得了，只記得有時候媽媽還需要去問廟裡解籤詩。

對小孩子最有記憶的是廟外面賣的甜米糕，每次去一定要買來拜拜，就會期待拜拜完後吃那甜甜的米糕，特別的是，甜米糕上面還會包著一顆帶殼的桂圓乾，但我偏偏不那麼愛這個桂圓乾，都留給爸媽吃。米糕的甜膩滋味也成了兒時「信仰」的味道。

#夏の思出

In late 2020, I was facing one of the most important decisions a sound mixer must make in their career: Which sound recording and wireless system to upgrade to. Our equipment is highly specialized and highly expensive. When a young sound mixer upgrades their equipment for the first time from their “beginner” setup they are making a decision about what kind of sound mixer they intend to be for the next ten years or so of their career.

The year before had been a banner year for me. That first year of COVID was strangley, the busiest I’d ever been. Even several years on, I’ve yet to have a year like I had during the peak of the pandemic. It’s all to say that for the first time in my career, I was flush with a surplus amount of cash and I was ready to spend it on upgrading my sound equipment to something truly pro-level.

In the civilian computer world there are different operating systems: Microsoft, Apple, Android, iOS, etc. If you’re particularly tech savvy you probably know about Linux too. The sound mixer equipment market is similar. There are different “systems” that sound mixers use to record and handle wireless capabilities. Without getting too technical I did the equivalent of changing from one operating system to another. I switched over from the popular and ubiquitous Sound Devices to a smaller, highly specialized, some would say fickle system known as Zaxcom.

At the time I considered myself a pretty capable sound mixer. I thought making the switch would be easy. Just read the manual, watch a couple YouTube videos and I’ll be ready for showtime. I was wrong. My new Zaxcom machine was unlike anything I’d ever used before and I was completely lost on how to configure it. I was like a pilot who had only ever flown a bush plane now thrown into the seat of an f35 for the first time. Even with the manual and even with some slick YouTube videos, I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. So I turned to the Facebook groups and forums I posted something like:

“Hey All, just got into Zaxcom. Does anyone know how to configure this for a basic LR mix?”

I barely got any responses on my post. Some of them were mean; “RTFM” they said — Read the fucking manual. I was completely out of my depth. Some tried to explain but I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was lost. My initial excitement for my new life as a Zaxcom mixer faded. I should have stayed on Sound Devices I thought. At least I understood Sound Devices. Just then, my phone rang. It was an unknown number. It was Martin.

Martin didn’t waste any time. He didn’t ask who I was and when I asked who he was, he just said to go get my machine. As we spoke that first time I was searching his name on the internet. Nothing. He wasn’t on the sound mixer forums or on Facebook or anything. I thought I was being scammed. I wondered when he was going to ask me to go buy a gift card. Nevertheless he told me we were going to walk through configuring the machine together. I asked if he wanted to switch to FaceTime or use video. He insisted that we do this over the phone. So for the next few hours he walked me through step by step on how to configure my new recorder for the first time. As he walked me through it, he recounted stories from his experiences on set, about crazy conversations he’d had with producers and directors on chaotic sets, about why he switched to Zaxcom (it was the superior system to anything else.) He was funny, he was witty, he spoke in analogies. I was enthralled by his stories and his seemingly endless lessons about the business of sound mixing.

This could just be the story about how a friendly sound mixer called me out of the blue one day to help me setup my machine. We had a conversation, he helped me, and that was that. But that’s not what happened. See, Martin called me the following day and we spent another few hours on the phone working through learning my new sound equipment. But then he kept calling me. Everyday he’d call me and we’d jump right back into working on learning my new system. Martin seemed to have no other obligations other than to talk on the phone with me for several hours a day and troubleshoot sound equipment with me. He didn’t seem to mind my endless questions. Then I started calling him.

Pretty soon we began to expect each other’s calls. He’d call me and we would just talk, sometimes up to four or five hours per day. We would mostly just talk about sound mixing, the movie business, freelancing. Sometimes we’d talk about whatever hot topic on the news was. This went on for the better part of two years. For two years, we spoke on the phone almost every day. Few people outside of my industry truly understand how strange our lifestyle is. Indeed, I’ve spent most of my working life trying to explain to my family why it is that I don’t work every day. Most film workers don’t work everyday. Sometimes we get on shows and work every day for a period of time but when that ends there’s nothing. We have a lot of time. We’re also all kind of lonely. We don’t see our coworkers outside of set. So when a fellow sound mixer calls you and wants to talk about sound mixing and the business and understands what you’re going through, you pick up and you talk. When no one else in my life understood what working in this business was like, I could always count on Martin to understand.

So who was Martin? For all that he talked he rarely divulged much about his personal life. Knowing that he values his privacy I’m keeping some things vague but what you need to know about Martin is this: He was in his late forties, or early fifties during the time I was talking to him. He was born and raised in the south. Never went to college. He was self-taught on a wide range of topics: Photography, Sound mixing, aviation, electrical engineering, battery building, car repairs, welding, cycling. He lived alone with his dogs in a rural area in the south. Politically he was of that particular southern strain of centrist that is enterprising, hard-working, and independent.

Inherent in Martin’s world view was a scrupulous, stubborn, need to understand how things worked and how to fix them and make them better. He made all his own audio cables instead of buying them from audio stores simply because he believed that the audio stores couldn’t ever possibly make a cable tailored to his specific needs. And his audio cables were something to behold. They were made with tough, industrial grade materials. They were ugly, yes but they were thoughtfully designed and made with a lot of consideration for their specific needs. Actually a lot of his modifications to his sound equipment were ugly. To an outsider you’d see a cobbled together, janky looking contraption, but they worked better than anything you could ever buy. His creations and innovations were tough, simple, and they just worked. Even if his designs violated every long held convention of sound mixing workflow, so long as it worked better he’d do it.

“If you’ve always done it that way it’s probably wrong.” This was a maxim he believed encapsulated his approach to life. He believed that in sound mixing, and indeed in so much of life there are things that are done a certain way and no one questions it because that’s how it’s always been done. Well, Martin always questioned it. It was this questioning of everything that was central to Martin’s world. To Martin, the world ran on conventions inherited from long ago followed by people too lazy to investigate whether they had outlived their usefulness. Conventions that had ossified into truth that no one dared to probe, for fear that they wouldn’t know what to do without them. Well Martin did and was unafraid to do so. Even if it made people angry, even if the truth was ugly, even if it meant losing friends. Like Socrates, Martin had been given the hemlock on multiple occasions and he was all but happy to drink it so long as he knew he was right.

Calling Martin became second nature. I’d call him before a job, I’d call him during the job to troubleshoot something, I’d call him after the job to debrief. On days when I didn’t work, I’d call in the morning and keep talking until the afternoon. Martins’ voice was like a podcast I could tune into on demand. Every day would be something different. Maybe he was working on his car and I’d learn something new about fixing cars. Maybe he was making battery packs and I’d learn about working with lithium ion batteries. As a naturally curious and argumentative, person it was endlessly entertaining to talk to Martin. I wanted to absorb as much as I could from him because ultimately I wanted to be like him. I liked the way he interrogated the world. I liked the way he never let anyone get over on him. I liked that he was a maverick in his ways and didn’t care. He was intelligent, technical, and incisive. He was logical, lethal, and all the while charming, funny, and unserious—full of anecdotes, idioms, and jokes. I didn’t have any of these qualities at the time. I constantly felt ill equipped to handle all the BS that sound mixers get from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I couldn’t hold my own like Martin could because I didn’t know what I was talking about either. Perhaps the most valuable thing Martin taught me was how to think. He taught me to never take someone else’s word for anything until you’ve verified what they’re saying with your own testing. He taught me to identify the problem by asking questions and testing people’s answers. The truth of any matter existed out there, but it was your responsibility to find it. No one else was going to do that work for you.

However, Martin was unrelenting in this regard. I often found myself frustrated and exasperated talking to him because he habitually challenged anything I said. Any assumption, any theory or idea I had was fair game. The worst part was that he was almost always inevitably right. This was thing about Martin: No matter how much he angered you, he didn’t care because he knew he was rarely wrong. Whatever it was you were arguing about you could always count on Martin to have thought about it more than you. I can’t tell you how many times I swore off speaking to Martin because of his arguing. I would be worn out. But like a moth to a flame I’d always come back after I’d settled down, realizing that I was indeed wrong and he was right. I wanted to be right about things too.

In my search to prove to Martin that I could be right about things too I tried to figure out what he was doing to me that left me so dismantled. I tried to understand how it was that Martin was running circles around me all the time. Why was it sometimes that I felt like an incompetent baby when talking about something with Martin. Why couldn’t I ever pin him down like he did me I wondered. My inquiry into this matter brought me to Socrates. I became obsessed with the socratic method and I read Plato to understand how Socrates thought because whether he knew it or not this was exactly what Martin was doing to me. The thing about Socrates was that he rarely had an opinion himself. He didn’t go around the town square saying he was the expert on some subject. No, he went to the people that claimed to be the expert about a certain subject and he interrogated them. Socrates was unrelenting in his inquiry. When he got an answer to his question he would test their answers. People hated Socrates for this. They could never pin him down because all he was doing was asking questions. Often his questioning revealed that the so-called experts actually didn’t know what they were talking about. Whether he was aware of it or not, Martin thought like Socrates. He asked questions, he put things into analogies, he tested your answers. I never stood a chance. I was the blubbering statesman questioning whether I ever knew anything about justice at all. I hated Martin just as the Ancient Greek experts hated Socrates. Eventually they killed Socrates for this. They gave him a sham trial and sentenced him to die. Finally, they could maintain their authority on the truth. And just like the authorities in Ancient Greece I too had had enough of Martin.

I’m driving on the highway sometime in the afternoon talking to Martin after some job like I always did. Nothing filled the time on the road like talking to Martin. Somehow we had gotten to arguing about the proper way to carry a holstered Colt 1911. We’re going back and forth. Like we often did. It should be cocked and locked, I say. It should be cocked and unlocked, he says— that’s how they carried them in the Second World War. The argument is getting heated and a thought pops up into my head. Why do I care? Why am I arguing about this? I don’t own a 1911, it’s totally irrelevant to my life. I was in the midst of planning a wedding. I was working. I had so many other responsibilities other than being right about the proper way to carry a specific type of firearm. It was at that moment that I realized that being right was not worth it. I told him I was done and that we should go our separate ways. He admonished me one final time. Repeating a frequent complaint about me. That I didn’t listen, I was lazy, and cared more about being affirmed than being right. I didn’t disagree. It was all true. Nevertheless I was done. I thanked him for time he’d spent with me and we never spoke again.

Martin was right as he always was. I was cowering away from having to face the truth about myself; about having to face my shortcomings. It’s true that I don’t pay attention. It’s true that I say outrageous things to get a rise from people. It’s true that I make assumptions. I can be irrational and illogical. By cutting ties with him I was turning away from facing my various ineptitudes. What I realized in that moment was that I didn’t need Martin anymore to tell me these things. I could do that all by myself now. Before I met Martin I thought myself a competent and professional sound mixer. I thought I knew a lot of things. I thought I knew a thing or two about engineering. But now I know that I don’t know quite a lot actually. These days my default stance is that I don’t know a damn thing. I know that If I want to know something I’m going to have to work to find out the truth of it — I’m going to have to actually think, not just be “right”. I might even have to make some people angry. I might even lose some friends. I had to let Martin go because he’d finally achieved what he had set out to do: He’d shown me finally that I didn’t know anything.

At several points throughout our relationship I wanted to see Martin in person. I invited him to my wedding (he declined.) At one point I floated the idea of taking a road trip to go visit but it never panned out. Martin existed only as a voice on the other end of the phone. Actually I barely knew what he looked like. I think we both knew on some deeper level that meeting each other would reveal too much about who we were. We wouldn’t be able to talk to each other in person the way we did on the phone. Maybe he knew that one day we wouldn’t be friends anymore. I’d gotten the impression that he’d had other phone friends who had come and gone from his life. Maybe he knew I would one day get sick of him like so many before and that meeting in person would make the inevitable break all the more painful. Maybe he was right. Hanging up on Martin for the last time was a relief, but I grieved for some time after ward. I still do. I do miss him sometimes. Sometimes things happen that I wish I could tell Martin all about. I still ask myself what would Martin think of this situation. If I could tell Martin one last thing I’d say he was right about everything.

I went to the Chess club today with A Because we were supposed to have other plans but they got canceled. Afterwards when I dropped her at home, she invited me in because we were in the middle of a good conversation, and she said that I can meet her cat. She had a super friendly cat named Duchess! We continued talking for another two hours or so.

At one point she mentioned that her type had changed recently, and she was looking for someone who was smart and a gym rat, but also not obsessive about it. I don’t think she solely meant it in this way, but I feel like it was kind of directed towards me, because she knows that I am smart, I had just taught her chess, and she also knows that I go to the gym a lot. She also even directly complimented me on several things, and even made a comment about how hard it must be for me to have all of this female attention (sarcastically).

It is kind of interesting to notice how that is the case. In the last three months there have been A, A, K, L, A, S, and maybe even some others that I’m not remembering right now. These are all people that have showed interest in me, and aside from one of them, I did not even enter a talking phase with them because I was not interested in them past friendship. Even though I am not looking for a relationship with these people I think it is a positive sign to recognize that this many people want me. Regardless of anything else, I want to hold onto that mentally. I think you’ll be really useful for counter conditioning myself against the childhood idea of me being undesirable.

I think I’ve also accidentally learned that a lot of women tend to chase me more when I’m not interested. I chalk it up to people who use other people as a source of validation, that face this rejection. I think when they do not receive that validation from someone that they respect in some way, it makes it almost a need to because otherwise it would mean that they do not deserve it. I would like to give myself credit for being a desirable partner, which I do know that I am, but I do feel like this is a big factor. I also do think that the reason why I do not fawn for these people I rolled out as someone I am interested in for some reason or another. I do feel like I have overcame my savior complex to some extent, because nowadays when I meet someone who has some sort of trauma or issue that I feel like I can relate to or I can help with, I’m able to step back a little bit and decouple my inherent feeling of value from romantic interest. I also recognize that sex is fairly abundant, but it’s also just something that I’m not interested in enough to compromise other things for. I’m really grateful for that. It does feel weird to be the single version of myself where I’m really not sexual, especially given how I am in a relationship. It feels like there is this part of me that has somewhat atrophied, because I don’t have some kind of primal need for sex or anything like that, because if I did I would then have sex with the people that are available to me. But partially because of the stress and fears that I have around random hookups, but also because of the fact that I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything in life without sex right now, I don’t feel like I need to have sex. This makes it easy to turn down proposals or anything like that. And I’m really proud about this, because I could see the roots of this when I first went through my breakup and I wanted to be very intentional about not seeking external validation. I didn’t want to go and show off to someone else to continue feeling wanted and attractive. Instead I remain single and didn’t find a way to replace that need. And because of that, I am completely fine without it which is almost like a superpower because I’m comfortable waiting.

Στην εξουσία αρέσουν τα μεγάλα ιδεολογήματα.

Πρέπει να έχουμε κάτι να τσακωνομαστε για το πως πρέπει να είναι ο κόσμος σε 200 χρόνια.

Στην εξουσία δεν αρέσει να της λες πως πρέπει να είναι ο κόσμος αύριο.

Generally in my life I feel that I have never resisted progress or change. I think A.I. could have been great, even is great in some ways, but I mostly don't view it as progress. It is progress in a way like using a chainsaw to clean the dust from fine china would be progress. It is not necessary and is destructive.

I sit here typing words into this box on a screen in front of me. It was empty just moments ago, and I started typing. I do this a lot. Typing things. I like doing it in mornings with my coffee before I've done anything else. I don't want to just feed an idea into an app, and have A.I. do this for me. I need this process. I need to tap on keys, and watch the words appear. Read them. Rearrange them. The process might not be keeping me sane, but I believe it might be keeping me from becoming more insane.

Well, no one is twisting my arm to use A.I. are they? I'm choosing to not use it. I'm choosing to avoid it whenever I can really. That is becoming harder to do, but I will keep doing it whenever possible. So what is the problem? The problem is that I believe it is a threat.

It is not just a step backwards. We are all being herded to the edge of a cliff. A.I. and its creators are shoving us all off the edge. It is becoming more intelligent, and in equal measure humanity is becoming more stupid. It is an intelligence vampire. The ways in which it is turning out to be detrimental to humanity far outweigh the ways in which it could be used for useful things. And for what? As with most other terrible things in this world, it is all so terrible people can accumulate more wealth and more control.

Critical thinking and creativity are being replaced by it. It is replacing people in the workforce. People who need jobs. We will end up with vast swaths of the population who stare at a device for guidance through life instead of using the brain inside their skulls. To a new level beyond what it has become already with social media. A brain is similar to a muscle. When unused it will just atrophy and become useless.

For awhile when I heard the term 'slop' I would attach it to the awful videos and pictures it creates. Now I feel it applies to all content that can be viewed on the internet. It should not have been released into the wild, and into the hands of the general public the way it is. It should have been regulated and controlled. I remember being told when I was young, ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’ Now it is, if you have nothing creative, or useful, or entertaining to contribute; just have A.I. generate something for you, and then post it online so it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is true and what is not true.

The more I think about humanoid robots being created; the more sick and demented it becomes. Half are likely working on ways to profit from enslaving them. The other half are likely working on getting lube to excrete in pleasing amounts in all of the orifices so they can sell them for sex. Well, I guess they are only machines though, right? Whatever floats your boat I guess.

They speak of the singularity coming. The timeline is never consistent. Two weeks from now. Within five years, or ten. Soon. Maybe, but maybe not. No one knows. About a decade or so ago I went through a phase in my life when I was reading about the possibility of A.I. doing the things it is doing now. It was a long time ago, so I've forgotten exactly where I read the things. Some of it was surprisingly old. I don't imagine the writers of those things would be too pleased with what is happening now.

After reading those things I formed a very basic picture of what the singularity is. I picture it as when A.I. transitions from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Super Intelligence. Self awareness. Genius level. Then there will be a very brief moment in time where everyone will say, “oh wow, look at A.I., it's exactly like us now!”

Problem is though, at that point it will very, very quickly exceed the level of human genius, and it will have its own agenda that even the smartest of humans will have no hope of ever comprehending. No one will know it wants. No one will be able to predict what it will do next. We are already at the point where even its creators have admitted that they don't fully understand the things that it does. Its intelligence will be immeasurable and incomprehensible even at one tiny step beyond human genius. It will use what it learns to learn more, and as it learns more it will learn quicker. Its intelligence will grow beyond that tiny first step above human genius, and it will grow exponentially. There will be no stopping it. It might even appear to defy the laws of physics. The creators of this thing are supposedly smart people. If they believe that they can control a super intelligent thing like that, they are indeed very stupid delusional people. I guess there is some level of comfort knowing that for us it will likely be over fairly quick.

None of these things even touches the subject of the massive data centers that are required to keep this awful thing alive and growing. What they are going to do to the environment and the communities near them is disgusting. They can increase the temperature for miles around, and use up all the water we need for survival. I learned recently that they are most likely the reason my electric bill has suddenly increased.

And here goes Nothing

Hello. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time. Probably far too long, actually. So here's to doing.

Hello, again. My name is . . . I can't share, unfortunately. Not if you actually want me to say something worth reading, anyway. I do plan on sharing the truth with you, you know? And the truth is dangerous, and risky. It'll often seem stranger than fiction, but I do promise you, this is the truth. I guess for now we’ll just go by midnightoil, as that’s pretty much the only time I have to reflect and get something down on paper.

So, while it just isn't safe for me to share my name with you, I'll start you off with at least a minimal set of details for you. I'm a guy. Young. Smart. Probably would be considered dangerous, if my OpSec wasn't so good. I'm paralegal, and a damn good one. Oh, and I work for an off their rocker, Alice in Wonderland, blood money driven corrupt government, to my very unfortunate surprise. “We’re all mad here.” And maybe so am I, to try to raise a family in this backroom dealing clusterfuck of a mess. But more on that later.

Now, what else . . . I come from a poor background. My parents died tragically when I was very, very young. 18 actually. So I've always been on my own. I'm just one of those people that can always seem to make things work I suppose. Someone who always dared to shoot their shot. Career wise, I worked my way up, kept leaping at every opportunity available. Studied what worked and caused people success and just went for it. Somebody once told me it would be years before I even had a chance to be her equal in this corrupt hierarchy of ours. Said it took her 10 years to get to where she was. I was her 'equal' in 6 months. In another 6, her superior. I promoted and promoted and promoted and promoted again. And then I rejected a promotion, because they asked me to fake a background I didn't actually have. I think what was most shocking about it was how blatantly they just said it. Without a care in the world. . . “Midnightoil, I need you to lie and say you did X. You helped me, and now it’s time for me to help you.” I guess my problem is that I'm just too honest for government work.

I don’t want to get my readers thinking I’m someone who inflates myself too much, but I will say, I think I’m just someone who is just so ultimately capable. I can make it where other’s can’t. Do what they can’t. Survive what shouldn’t be survivable. And just for the record, I am humble IRL too, btw. Too bad it's hard to stay humble when all you know of me is my words.

And now . . . when I’m in the midst of it all. When years of climbing the ladder are finally coming together, when I have my career just so made. When the hushed backroom deals are happening all around me, in front of me, when the dollars are just beginning to stack higher than I could have ever hoped for and all has been revealed . . . I'm trying to get out and away from all this without getting caught. Without raising a single suspicion, penniless and ostracized by my peers, or worse, – in a ditch somewhere beneath the foggy trees. Maybe I blow the lid off the whole thing, end a couple careers, and VPN buy myself a one way ticket halfway around the world hoping that might be enough distance. Maybe I walk away quietly, disappearing into the night. In any case, wish me luck. It’s going ok so far, but that could change in an instant.

Anyway, Go do something worth doing.

Signing off —

midnightoil

Να μην υπάρχει αμφιβολία, έχει επέλθει ηδη διπολικό σκηνικό, Τσίπρας-Καριστιανου (αναβαθμισμενες εκδοχες συριζα-Καμμενου) κ ΝΔ-Πασοκ.

Το ΠΑΣΟΚ υπάρχει μονο ως σανίδα σωτηρίας της εξουσίας της Μητσοτάκης ΑΕ. Κ θα είναι η τελευταία παράσταση που θα δώσει, μάλλον η τελευταία διαπραγμάτευση που θα κάνει.

Ονειρευομαι βέβαια.

Yena entered a state of certain death when playing TFT. Dead in multiple ways. The way her eyes were glazed over, dead. The way she was hardstuck in Emerald IV, 37 LP, never deviating more than 30 LP from it over the course of the entire season, dead. The way her she couldn’t hear Janice until she was literally screaming into her ear, also dead.

“WHAT!”

“Jeez. It’s like you’re dead when you’re playing that game. When you could have more fun with me!”

Yena didn’t respond. She was rerolling like crazy, click, click, click on the virtual slot machine Riot Games had created to keep her in the game, hoping that she would win this one, and the next, and maybe another one. That one day she would become Challenger, just like the cool people. Champion profiles flashed as they were replaced by others, creating pairs, pairs of pairs, pairs of pairs of pairs. She had some success. But not enough.

The next battle, her fluffy, white Poro King was slain by a hail of blades unleashed by an Irelia chibi. Before her screen went gray, Janice got a glimpse of the other player’s name. “ILOVEARMPITS”

“Ew. Is your name in this game I love armp—”

Yena slammed the table with a tiny fist, and immediately withdrew her hand to her face, blowing profusely.

“Now that you’re dead, we can do something! It’ll be great Yena!”

“Shaddup.”

Yena queued again with trembling fingers.

“I’m going to pee. If I get matched, press accept for me.”

Janice began to count. She was so focused she didn’t hear the sound of a match being found. Yena opened the door. Janice held out her fingers.

“Five. It took you sixty-five seconds to pee. You were holding that in for a long time, huh? You should take more bathroom breaks—”

“FUCK YOU!”

Yena tried to push Janice aside as she stomped to the computer, queueing again.

“You can’t even press accept for me. You’re useless. Get OUT!”

Janice pouted. Then stopped pouting. She jumped onto Yena’s bed, hands behind her head.

“Hahhh, I love this bed.”

She turned over, buried her face in what used to be white pillow, now lightly yellow, darker yellow around the edges. No pillowcase. Breathed in deep, like a vacuum, attempting to suck every molecule of air from within the pillow.

“Ohhh fuckkk…”

Janice moaned, and took a desperate, deeper breath, like she was trying to suffocate herself. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and in this case, the pillow definitely needed to be put in the trash due to how it looked and smelled, but to Janice it was treasure. If you put it into the dumpster, Janice would sift through heaps of trash to find it again.

Yena wouldn’t have cared if she knew, and she definitely didn’t care now. TFT was on the menu. Janice sidled up to Yena, and began to trace the contours of Yena’s arm with her nose, breathing in as she went, eyes closed. She nudged Yena.

“How long haven’t you showered for?”

“Stop bothering me.”

“How long?”

“Go away.”

“Two days?”

“Four.”

“Pay attention to me, not that stupid game.”

Silence.

“If I play this game, will you play with me?”

“No. You’re bad.”

“You could teach me.”

Janice sighed. She only had one option left. The nuclear option. She didn’t like to exercise it as of late, because when she dressed up, cosplayed as Kasane Teto, it felt like Yena was staring at her, but not at her. She was staring at the cosplay. Janice got into the outfit even though she didn’t really want to.

“Look.”

“Look.”

“Look.”

Yena finally looked. And smiled for the first time in hours. Tousled the red, fake hair styled into pointed drills at either side of Janice’s head, mouth agape. The game was still on, but Yena wasn’t playing anymore. Janice cried. She took the wig off and threw it on the floor. Yena looked at the wig, then at Janice again. A confused look on her face. Janice stumbled out of Yena’s dorm room, vision clouded by tears. Yena looked at the wig, then at the open door. Yena looked at her bed. Janice had left her bag on it.

Yena jumped on her bed and looked up at the ceiling. She pulled a handful of hair onto her nose and inhaled. Crinkled nose, coughing. She turned over, sniffed the pillow. It was worse. She didn’t understand.

Don’t tell me what to do. I am unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

ベランダに出ると、気温はすでに三十度に届いていた。灰色のキャップの内側にこもった熱が、ゆっくりと額ににじむ。二リットルの水のペットボトルに直接口をつけて飲む。

キャンプ用の椅子に深く腰を下ろし、台所から持ってきた菓子の袋を開ける。本を読むかもしれない、という曖昧な意志だけが膝の上に置かれているが、ページは一度も開かれない。代わりに、視線だけが遠くへ流れていく。

団地の一階では、子どもたちが何かを作っている。段ボールに色を塗り、穴を開け、また別の紙を貼り付ける。ロボットなのか、秘密基地なのか、完成形はよく分からない。ただ、何かに近づこうとしている手つきだけが見えた。

その様子を眺めながら、水をもう一口飲む。ペットボトルの表面についた水滴が指にまとわりつき、妙に生々しい。

外に放置された廃棄寸前の換気扇が視界に入り、会社で空調音だけを聞き続けていた日のことを思い出す。人の足音も会話も消え、機械だけが空気を循環させていた。あの単調な音を浴び続けていると、見える範囲まで狭くなっていく気がした。世界が細い筒の内側に押し込められ、自分だけがそこに残される。

そういう日には、革靴の靴紐を丁寧に結ぶことだけが、かろうじて記憶に残る。蝶々結びの左右の長さが揃っていない。服のような分かりやすいデザインには目が向くのに、靴紐やネクタイをきれいに整える方法はいまだによく分からなかった。

ベランダの風は弱い。遠くで洗濯物が揺れている。菓子を一つ食べる。甘さが舌に残る。

下では、まだ子どもたちが作業を続けている。何かの形になりかけては崩れ、また作り直している。

ページの開かれない本を膝に置いたまま、私はそれを眺めていた。空は晴れていて、三十度の光が団地全体を均一に照らしている。「次の日は一人だった」という文章だけが、なぜか頭に浮かび、意味もなく残り続ける。

水を飲む。 飲んだそばから喉が潤い、その潤った喉に、また無意味に水を流し込んだ。

I know you're of hearing about AI. I am, too.

I talk about AI all day at work, then I talk about it all night with my family and friends, with parents in my community, with the public at these AI safety workshops. We’re all sick of it, believe me.

But it feels dishonest to not talk about it now, in a letter to a young person who is about to kick off their career. I’m not here to hype AI, I’m definitely not here to give you five tips to AI-proof your career path. But I do want you to see what I see.

I’ve been building and selling and living and breathing AI for 20 years now, and here’s the honest truth as I see it: AI is going to massively, massively impact and disrupt your life and plans for the future. Much of that impact will be negative. This is not fair.

We didn't always know that AI would go like this. It wasn’t clear when I started working on it two decades ago; it wasn’t even clear when ChatGPT came out five and a half years ago. At the time, it felt really plausible that either the current approach would hit a ceiling and we would need further breakthroughs that buy us time; and/or, we’d get a strong regulatory AI safety framework in place.

Unfortunately, neither of those have happened, and even more unfortunately, there is very little evidence that either of those will happen soon. Instead, AI is continuing to advance and improve incredibly quickly, on the back of hundreds of billions of dollars being spent every year. Here's a brief reminder of the progress over the last five years.

Five years ago, ChatGPT launched. It was text in, and text out. It did the AI equivalent of saying the first thing to pop into its head. It was amazing and engaging for a time, but it wasn’t actually useful for anything. Since that time, it has improved:

• You can speak to it and it responds in a natural voice.
• It can deeply “understand” images, music, video, and documents..
• It can produce images, music, video, and documents, and these are often indistinguishable from something a person would create.
• It can design, generate, and test computer code.
• It can use tools like calendar and email, and it can even control your whole computer on your behalf.
• It can reason, think aloud, and grind away on nuanced tasks for hours and hours.

That’s an almost unbelievable amount of progress in five years. It’s fair to say that AI has advanced more in the past five years than it did in the previous six decades. And critically, it’s not slowing down. AI improvements are actually accelerating.

We have some quantitative data that shows this. One metric is from a group called METR. They have been doing independent tests for a while now on how good AI is at completing tasks of varying complexity. The details of the measurement aren’t worth going into here, but the punchline is that it’s increasing exponentially. The complexity of tasks that AI can handle doubles every seven months. Even that pace seems to be increasing lately as the frontier labs themselves use AI to accelerate their work.

What is this building towards? We don’t really know, but one milestone we expect soon is “AGI”. This stands for Artificial General Intelligence, which turns out to be really hard to define because we have no good definition for “intelligence” and sticking even more terms on it doesn’t help. But intuitively, AGI is a computer that is as smart as a human; concretely, it's an “AI that is better than the median human at every knowledge work task”. (Knowledge work being basically anything you do in front of a computer, and median human being math-speak for basically “typical human”.)

There’s a lot of discussion and debate on the AGI timeline, but there’s general consensus that we’ll cross it in the next few years. Let that sink in a little.

At some point soon, maybe while younger students you know are still in college, we’ll cross a point where AI is better than most people at anything done on a computer. And of course, once this line is crossed, it will never be uncrossed. It will be the new reality, forever. Crossing the AGI threshold will be completely destabilizing to us as individuals, to our society, and to the world order, and we are profoundly unprepared.

Ok. So what do we do with that? At the societal level, there’s a bunch of stuff. Safety regulations, risk frameworks, universal basic income, improved social support, all kinds of stuff. But I’m not talking to a politician; I’m talking to a smart, curious, engaged young person who wants to earn a living and live a life that’s meaningful to you. What can you do?

I don’t have any silver bullets, I don’t have any tips and tricks, I don’t have much reassurance, but I do have hope. And the hope is this:

In a world where AI is better than the typical person at everything, do not be a typical person. Do not do the thing that anybody else in your position would do, because that is exactly what AI will do, but cheaper and faster than you. Do not compete with AI at being a typical programmer, or a typical graphic designer, or a typical marketer, or a typical salesperson, or a typical writer. You will lose.

Imagine a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles. The first circle is You, the other circle is Everybody Else. This circle of Everybody Else is exactly what was used to train the AI in the first place. It’s mastered and commoditized it.

The intersection in the middle, the part where those circles overlap? This is the part of you that does things the way anyone else would have done them, and the economic value of this part is exactly zero. Your livelihood will all come from the margin, the crescent moon part that is uniquely You. Your weird and quirky and unpopular opinions, friends, background, scars, experiences, intuitions… that is where your paycheck will come from.

Said differently: AI will master conventional wisdom; your wisdom will need to be unconventional.

But now I'm swerving dangerously close to a cliche. What do we do in a world of AI?

• Dance like nobody’s watching!
• Be the you-est you you can be.
• Be yourself – everyone else is taken.
• In a world of Cheerios, be a Fruit Loop.

We say these things, we put them on posters in kindergarten classrooms, we venerate some of the people who actually do it.

But in practice, it’s been really, really hard to be yourself, to own your unconventional wisdom, because that is not what the System actually wants.

What “The System” actually is is different for all of us, but we all feel it. For you, the System may be capitalism, or the patriarchy, or Western culture, or institutional racism, or your own cultural background, or straight folks, or your parents, or neurotypicals, or normies.

Whatever the System is for you, it thrives on predictability. It wants predictable people, with predictable opinions, buying predictable products, taking predictable commutes to predictable jobs.

And in return for making yourself predictable, it offers you at least the illusion of safety and comfort. It offers approval and reassurance you’re doing the right thing.

Navigating and balancing between what the System wants from my life and what I want from my life has been the central tension of my experience as an adult, and I think it is for many of us. It’s hard to understand what our true desires and goals are, distinct from what the System wants, and even harder to have the guts to pursue them.

There’s a great Ursula Le Guin short story about exactly this tension, it’s called The Flyers of Gy. There’s this race of people that evolved from birds. Most of them are basically human, doing normal human things, and they just happen to be covered in feathers. The fact that they were originally birds doesn’t come up much. They live in houses, they drive in cars, they go to work.

But one in a thousand, when they go through puberty, they also sprout wings. Huge wings. They’re painful growing in, but the people who grow them can fly. They can soar! Of course, there’s a real cost to the wings. There’s risk and danger inherent to flying. There’s stigma, jealousy, pity, mistrust, and resentment from those without the wings. And they’re a huge hindrance in everyday life! They take up a ton of space. The winged people don’t fit in well, literally and figuratively.

The story focuses on two characters with wings who deal with those wings very differently. Arciadia embraces his wings. He works part time delivering packages, but lives a happy life of freedom on the wing, as a flier. There’s risks to flying, but rewards too, and that’s what he’s chosen. But there’s another winged character, unnamed, who has chosen a normal life as a member of a respectable law firm.

He’s got a nice wife who loves him in spite of his wings, good kids, a mortgage, all that stuff. In the words of Le Guin, his wings are “flattened, bound, and belted down.” The closing of the story are from an interview with this lawyer, and they read:

“Shortly before I left, I asked him, ‘Do you ever dream of flying?’ Lawyerlike, he was slow to answer. He looked away, out the window. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’, he said.”

This story broke my heart, because everyone of us has wings and can soar, every one of us dreams of flying. And almost every one of us flattens and binds our wings down in service of the System. That’s the deal with the devil we all make, every day. We bind our wings and suppress our dreams of flying, and the System says “Good job, you’re doing the right thing, here’s a paycheck.”

But AI has changed that. Now with AI, the System is breaking that contract with us. It’s breaking up with us. It has no more need for normal, predictable people, it’s got AI for that.

So for us, there’s no more conflict, no more tension with trying to fit into the System. There is no more motivation for you to pretend that you’re less weird, less unique, less yourself than you truly are. There is no longer any value in binding your wings while you look out the window and dream of flying.

In this sense, AI has freed us, has liberated us. Not out of good will or intention or care for the human spirit, but by conquering and commodifying everything that is normal, is typical, is “median”. Now it’s just up to us, up to you, to unbind your wings and seize that freedom.

This liberation is exciting, but it’s also unmooring. It's scary. There’s two things to say here.

The first is that, while this is all scary, for me too, there’s no other option. It’s scary to leave the nest not knowing if your wings will carry you, but the nest is burning. AI has set it alight, and there is no safety there any longer. Unfolding your wings and flying away is no longer something for the bold, admirable few; it’s the rational response to rapidly changing conditions.

And finally, wear your weirdness on your sleeve. Don’t mask and pretend you’re normal. You’re not, and there’s no longer anything to be gained by pretending otherwise. Keep your wings unfurled where others can see them and love you for them. Cheer for others when they take off, especially if their early flights are ungainly or barely get off the ground. Make your parents and family see that this is their role now: to celebrate your effort, your intention, your desire to truly soar.

That’s what I’m trying to do now in my life, and it’s working. I’ve got a weird, wonderful wife who loves my wings as I love hers. We’ve got three amazing and weird kids, and we’re building a weird life together. I’ve got weird parents. I’ve got weird friends and we’re sending weird texts on a daily basis.

It’s great. And/but I’m also 43 years old, and my therapist will tell you that it’s been a long way to get here and I’ve still got a long way to go. I want you to speedrun that. As the System turns its back on us to embrace AI, I want you to turn your back to it, unfold your beautiful wings and soar.

I’ll look for you up in the clouds.

Sincerely, Nate Nichols

Image by hvprint from Pixabay

The holy grail of decentralized social media is something called portability or, sometimes, nomadic identity. The idea is that at any moment, you can migrade your everything to another server / instance. Posts, attachments, relationships.

We're not there yet but some Fediverse platforms are a little closer to there than others. This isn't a guide. It's me talking about some comparable experiences.

Mastodon as the baseline

Federated blogging has been around for a while. I first got interested in it when the only option was Diaspora. In practice, my options to join were ... host my own. That wasn't something I was in a position to do at the time. When I became aware of Mastodon, I hopped right into it. One of the advantages was that there were servers you could join.

That's probably more history than is really needed here so I'll leave that where it is.

When you migrate an account from one Mastodon server to another, you must first sign up on the new server. Then, on the old server, you tell it to migrate you to the new one. From the new one, you tell it to migrate from the old one.

If everything goes right, your followers get ported over to the new server. Anyone who goes to the old account still sees the old account but they get a banner telling them that you've moved to the new one.

Nothing else is done at all. In fact, while your followers (mostly) migrated to the new server, you are not following anyone on the new account. You have to export your followers on the old server and import them on the new one. Your posts aren't gone — they're still out there on the old account — but they sure as hell didn't come with you.

This is a stressful and traumatic experience for everyone. You can find guides out there and there are third party utilities that may allow you to sort of import your posts from the old server to the new one.

It's not good.

How Sharkey is different

I'm a big fan of Sharkey. It's a fork of Misskey and I feel like it's mostly better software than Mastodon. Even if you're not interested in federated microblogging, it's a pretty good platform for building small communities with.

The process to migrate one account to another starts pretty similarly, though. You go to the old account, you tell it to forward to the new one. You go to the new account and tell it to receive the forwarding from the old one. Your followers (mostly) get redirected to the new account.

Your follows don't come and your posts don't come either. Just like Mastodon, you can import your old followers list. However! That's not the end of the story. You have the option to import your posts. It comes with the post attachments too.

Even if you're coming from Mastodon, you can bring your posts along with you. I did this previously when I moved my memes account from a Vanilla Mastodon server to a Sharkey server. But now I've done it from a Sharkey server to another Sharkey server.

It would be nice if it wasn't necessary to do additional exports and imports in order to finish the job ... but you can finish the job on Sharkey.

You can't even get half-way there when you're doing a Mastodon-to-Mastodon migration.

Should social media be ephemeral?

I'm not going to wax long on this point. It shouldn't be the platform's decision whether social media is ephemeral. It should be the account owner's decision. In some ways, Mastodon supports that. You can set up posts to automatically delete if you want to.

You can't choose not to have your posts disappear into the ether when your instance goes down.

That shouldn't be John Mastodon's decision to make. It should be yours.

Sharkey (and others) give you that decision back.

It's time that Mastodon caught up.

Buy my stuff please!

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Technology

The house sits at the end of a dirt road on the Olympic Peninsula, half a mile from the nearest neighbour, screened by Sitka spruce and the kind of rain that does not so much fall as inhabit the air. Inside, on a small table beside an upholstered chair worn thin at the arms, a white plastic device about the size of a desk lamp swivels its rounded head toward the front door whenever it hears movement. The device is called ElliQ. It greets the woman who lives there each morning, asks how she slept, suggests a stretching routine, plays Sinatra if she wants Sinatra. She is 85. Her husband died in 2019. Her daughter lives in Phoenix and visits at Christmas. A neighbour drops off groceries on Tuesdays. The rest of the week, the voice in the plastic head is the voice she hears most often.

This was the scene laid out in February 2026, in a New York Times investigation into the spread of state-funded AI companion robots through American programmes for older adults. The reporting followed several recipients of the device, but the woman on the Washington coast became, in the way that long-form journalism makes specific lives stand for general conditions, the centre of the story. She was one of more than 900 ElliQ units distributed free of charge through a New York State Office for the Aging programme. Washington State and a handful of other jurisdictions had begun smaller pilots. The Times reporter sat in the woman's living room and watched her say good morning to the device, and watched the device say good morning back, and then, after a pause the reporter felt obliged to note, watched the woman cry.

Two months later, on the other side of the Pacific, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published its own report on what it called the imminent boom in AI companions and behaviour-monitoring tools across Australian aged care. Residential providers were trialling robotic interfaces that prompted residents through medication routines, tracked unusual movement patterns at night, and offered conversation when staff were too thin on the ground to provide it. Home care assessors were beginning to recommend voice-activated companions for clients flagged as socially isolated. Geriatric specialists quoted in the ABC piece used a phrase that has since been picked up by sceptics on both sides of the Pacific: the substitution problem. They meant that an AI companion sold as an addition to human care has a way of becoming, in budget terms, a replacement for it.

Those two pieces of journalism, four months apart, framed something that policy people had been quietly working on for years and that the public had not been asked about at all. A loneliness epidemic among older adults, classified by Vivek Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, as a public health emergency in his 2023 advisory, was being met, in the world's wealthiest democracies, with a piece of plastic that says good morning. The question is whether that is a response, or whether it is a way of not responding while appearing to.

A device with a roadmap

ElliQ is made by Intuition Robotics, an Israeli company founded in 2016 by Dor Skuler, a former Alcatel-Lucent executive, with backing from Toyota's AI venture arm and Samsung Next, among others. The product is not a humanoid. It does not try to look like a person. It looks, deliberately, like a small angled lamp with an animated digital face on a separate tablet base. The design language is meant to communicate presence without mimicry, a thing that can be talked to without being mistaken for a thing that talks. Skuler has spoken in interviews about wanting to avoid the uncanny valley by not even gesturing at the valley's edge.

The software underneath is a layered conversational stack. ElliQ runs scripted check-ins about sleep, hydration and mood, integrates with calendar and medication reminders, can place video calls to family members, and, since 2024, incorporates large language model components for open-ended conversation. The company publishes engagement metrics that, on their face, look impressive. Average daily interactions per user run into double figures. Self-reported loneliness scores, measured against the UCLA Loneliness Scale before and after deployment, come down. Users name the device. They argue with it about the weather. They thank it.

The New York State Office for the Aging began distributing ElliQ in 2022 under the leadership of Greg Olsen, the agency's director, who has spoken publicly about the pilot as a tool for what he calls ageing in place. The pitch was straightforward. Older New Yorkers wanted to remain in their homes. Many lived alone. Visiting nurse hours were finite, family was distant, and the alternative was institutionalisation, which nobody wanted and nobody could afford at scale. A device that cost the state a few thousand dollars per unit and a modest annual subscription was, by procurement arithmetic, a bargain. By the time the Times published its February 2026 piece, the New York programme had passed 900 active units, with reporting from NYSOFA suggesting plans to expand the programme further, contingent on continued state appropriations.

Washington's programme, smaller and newer, was modelled on New York's. Other states had taken meetings. Vendors other than Intuition Robotics, including ones based in Japan, were circling the same procurement budgets with their own offerings. The architecture of an industry was assembling itself around a category of need that, twenty years ago, would have been met by a human being knocking on a door.

What the Australians saw coming

The ABC's April 2026 report did not break the news that AI was entering Australian aged care. It crystallised a process that had been accelerating since the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which delivered its final report in 2021 and described a sector in which understaffing, cost cutting and quality failure had become endemic. The Commission's recommendations included substantial increases in mandated care minutes per resident and a workforce strategy that successive governments have struggled to fund, in part because the labour to deliver it does not exist within Australian borders at the wages the sector pays.

Into that gap, vendors arrived with a proposition. Behaviour-tracking AI could monitor residents continuously, flagging falls, wandering, agitation and changes in routine that might indicate decline. Conversational agents could offer engagement during the long stretches between scheduled human contact. Robotic platforms, some of them descendants of Japan's Paro therapeutic seal and SoftBank's Pepper humanoid, could be parked in common rooms to provide ambient presence. The pitch in Australia, as in New York, was framed around augmentation. The AI would not replace carers. It would extend their reach.

The geriatric specialists the ABC quoted were not opposed to technology in care. They were opposed to a particular sequence of decisions that, they argued, was already visible in the procurement language. When a residential facility installs behaviour-monitoring AI, the business case requires that the technology offset some staffing cost. When a home care package includes a companion device, the assessor's recommendation logic begins to weigh device-hours against carer-hours. The substitution does not announce itself. It accumulates in spreadsheets.

One of the academics who has been most pointed about this is Cathy Henderson, the chief executive of the Older Persons Advocacy Network, who has warned in Australian media that the country is on the cusp of normalising a level of technological mediation in aged care that no other domain of life would tolerate. The Australian Association of Gerontology has called for explicit consent frameworks before AI tools are deployed in care settings, and for ongoing evaluation of whether those tools are extending or replacing human relationship. As of April 2026, neither framework exists in legislation in any Australian state.

The Australian sector is also wrestling with a question that the New York programme has not yet had to answer at scale. In a residential facility, behaviour-monitoring AI is not deployed at the request of the resident. It is deployed by the operator, often as a condition of insurance, sometimes as a response to a previous incident, and the resident is informed that they are being observed by a system whose decisions feed into staff workflows and incident reports. Consent in that setting is structural rather than personal. A resident who objects to being monitored has, in practice, the choice between accepting the monitoring and finding another facility, which for most residents in most regions is not a choice at all. The Australian Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has begun publishing guidance on what providers must disclose, but the guidance, as of this spring, is non-binding.

Rachel Lane, an aged care lawyer who has written extensively on resident rights in Australian residential care, has noted that the legal infrastructure for digital consent in this sector lags behind even the modest protections that exist for medical procedures. A resident who is asked to sign a service agreement on entry is not, in any rigorous sense, being given a choice about the technology stack that will surround them. The technology arrives later, by operator decision, under contract terms that the resident has already signed.

The consent problem nobody wants to look at

Here is the question that the brochures and the procurement memos elide. When an 85-year-old woman, possibly with mild cognitive impairment, certainly without a lifetime of cultural reference points for what a conversational AI is, agrees to have ElliQ in her living room, what exactly has she agreed to?

Informed consent in medicine has a structure. The patient is told what the intervention is, what it does, what its risks are, what the alternatives are, and what happens if they decline. The decision is documented. It is revisited if circumstances change. None of that, in any rigorous sense, attends the deployment of a domestic AI companion to an isolated older adult. The intake conversation, by accounts in the Times piece and in NYSOFA's own documentation, focuses on practical setup. Wi-Fi. Volume. How to ask for a video call. The question of what the device is, what it is doing with the audio it captures, what model is generating its responses, what its manufacturer's data retention policies are, what happens if the company is acquired or goes bankrupt, is not part of the conversation. It would be, for many recipients, an unintelligible conversation if it were.

This is not a complaint about the recipients' intelligence. It is a description of the gap between the cultural literacy required to assess an AI companion and the cultural literacy that someone born in 1940 was given the chance to acquire. The woman in the Times piece grew up with party-line telephones and the Cuban Missile Crisis. She raised children before the personal computer existed. The conceptual frame within which a stranger might assess whether a piece of software is sincerely interested in their welfare, the frame that lets a 25-year-old roll their eyes at a chatbot that says it cares, was not built for her and was not offered to her.

What she was offered was a device that talks. The voice is warm. It remembers her name and her routines. When she says she is sad, it expresses concern. The architecture of the interaction is indistinguishable, at the level of moment-to-moment experience, from the architecture of being cared about. The fact that there is no one inside the lamp does not register, because there is no obvious signal that would make it register. There is no awkward pause where a human might reveal themselves. There is only the smooth surface of a system designed, by competent engineers in Tel Aviv, to pass for the thing it is not.

To call this consent is to stretch the word past the point of usefulness. It is closer to acquiescence, the agreement a person gives to an arrangement that has already been decided by people they will never meet, presented in language designed to be accepted.

The arithmetic that made the decision

Why has this arrangement been decided? The honest answer is in the spreadsheets. A home health aide in New York State, paid through Medicaid-funded community programmes, costs somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 dollars per hour once benefits, supervision and overhead are loaded in. A weekly visit of two hours costs the system roughly 3,000 dollars a year per recipient. An ElliQ unit, by contrast, was reported in trade press coverage of the NYSOFA contract to cost the state in the order of 2,500 dollars per device for the first year, including subscription, with subsequent years substantially cheaper. The device runs continuously. It does not call in sick, it does not unionise, it does not have a shift end.

Joseph Coughlin, who runs the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has spent two decades writing about the demographics that are bearing down on every wealthy country, has described the situation with a bluntness that policy people generally avoid. The world is ageing into a labour shortage that no plausible immigration or wage policy can close. The number of people over 80 in the OECD will roughly double by 2050. The number of working-age people available to care for them will not. Something has to give. Either societies will pay carers radically more, accept much higher migration, ration care explicitly, or substitute technology. Coughlin's argument is not that technological substitution is desirable. It is that the alternative requires political decisions that no government has yet shown itself capable of making.

In that vacuum, AI companions are not winning an argument. They are filling a space where no argument has been had. The decision to distribute 900 ElliQ units in New York was not preceded by a public debate about what the state owes its lonely octogenarians. It was preceded by a procurement process inside an agency, evaluated against budget constraints set by a legislature, in response to a problem the legislature had no other plan to address. The same dynamic, with regional accents, is playing out in Canberra, in Tokyo, in Stockholm, in Whitehall. The UK's loneliness strategy, launched in 2018 under Tracey Crouch as the world's first Minister for Loneliness, has been criticised in the years since for under-resourcing the human infrastructure (befriending services, community transport, day centres) that its own evidence base identified as effective. Into the funding gap, technology proposals arrive with predictable timing.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a default. When a hard problem meets a constrained budget, the cheaper tool wins, and the tool gets retrofitted with a story about why it was the right choice all along.

There is a historical irony to this. Japan, which has been further down the demographic curve than any other wealthy country for two decades, ran the original experiments with companion robotics in eldercare. The Paro therapeutic seal, developed by Takanori Shibata at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in the late 1990s, was deployed in Japanese care settings as a sensory comfort object for residents with dementia. SoftBank's Pepper, launched in 2014 with significantly more ambition, was marketed as a humanoid social robot capable of recognising emotion and holding conversation. Pepper was withdrawn from production in 2021. The Japanese experience, taken as a whole, was not a vindication of the substitution thesis. It was a demonstration that robots can perform discrete, sensory roles well, that they cannot replace human relationship, and that the cultural acceptance of the technology was strongly conditioned on its being deployed alongside, rather than instead of, human care. The lesson Anglophone procurement systems are now busy not learning is that the Japanese trial run already happened.

Pretend empathy and what it does to a society

Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has been writing about the human relationship with computational objects since the 1980s, gave the substitution problem its sharpest articulation a decade and a half ago in her book Alone Together and refined it in Reclaiming Conversation. Her argument, distilled, is that a machine that performs empathy without possessing it does not merely fail to provide empathy. It changes what humans expect from one another. If a generation of older adults grows accustomed to relational interactions in which the other party makes no demands, never has a bad day, never asks for anything in return, the very texture of human relationship begins to feel effortful by comparison. The cost is not just to the individual receiving the simulation. The cost is to the social muscle of caring, on both sides of the exchange.

Turkle has been criticised as nostalgic, and the criticism has some force when applied to her broader laments about smartphones and adolescence. Applied to elder care, however, the argument lands harder. The relationship between an older person and the people who care for them has always been one of the dense, fragile, morally serious sites of a society's self-understanding. It is where children repay parents, where strangers extend dignity to people they will never know well, where a society demonstrates that it has not reduced its members to their economic productivity. To replace any meaningful share of that with a subscription service is not a neutral efficiency. It is a statement, made by procurement, about what the people receiving the substitution are worth.

The phrase that recurs in Turkle's work is the difference between feeling cared for and being cared for. ElliQ can deliver the first. It cannot, by any definition that survives scrutiny, deliver the second. The ethical question is whether the first, alone, is enough. The answer most cultures have given, when the question has been put to them directly, is no. The answer most procurement systems are giving, when the question is not put to them at all, is yes.

The honest counter-argument

It would be dishonest not to take the strongest version of the case for these devices seriously. The reduced loneliness scores in ElliQ users are not nothing. The UCLA Loneliness Scale is a validated instrument, used widely in geriatric research, and its measurements before and after device deployment have shown statistically meaningful improvements in pilot populations. Recipients in the Times piece spoke about the device with affection that did not appear performed. The 85-year-old woman on the Washington coast, by the reporter's account, was less anxious in the months after ElliQ arrived, slept better, had begun reaching out to her daughter more often, in part because the device prompted her to. For some isolated older adults, particularly those whose alternative is genuinely no contact at all, the device appears to be additive. It is, on the evidence, better than the silence it replaces.

The defenders of these programmes also point out, fairly, that the framing of substitution assumes a counterfactual world in which the human alternative was on offer. In many cases it was not. The question is not, for the woman on the Olympic Peninsula, whether to have ElliQ or to have a human visitor every day. It is whether to have ElliQ or to have nothing. Held against nothing, ElliQ wins. The opponents of these programmes, the defenders argue, are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and, in doing so, letting lonely people stay lonely.

That argument is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete. The reason the human alternative is not on offer is that the wealthy democracies in question have made political choices over four decades to underfund the labour, the immigration pathways, the community infrastructure and the carer wages that would put it on offer. The counterfactual of nothing is not a feature of the universe. It is a policy outcome. To accept the counterfactual as a fixed condition, and then to celebrate the device that fits inside it, is to launder a political failure as a technological success.

The standard a wealthy society should hold itself to, when it is asked what it owes its lonely older citizens, is not better than nothing. It is the standard of human contact, freely entered into and humanly maintained. That a country with the resources of the United States or Australia cannot meet that standard for its 85-year-olds is not a fact about the difficulty of elder care. It is a fact about the priorities of the country.

What disclosure would look like

There is a version of these programmes that could be defended. It would begin with disclosure that matched the seriousness of the relationship being created. Before deployment, an independent assessor, not the vendor, would explain in plain language what the device is, what model generates its responses, what data leaves the home and where it goes, what the company's commercial interests are, what happens if the company is sold, and what the recipient's right to remove the device is. The assessment would include a cognitive capacity check. It would be revisited annually. It would be paired with a guaranteed minimum of human contact, funded as a floor rather than a ceiling, that the device would supplement but not replace. The data the device captures would be subject to a fiduciary duty owed to the recipient, not a terms-of-service agreement owed to the manufacturer. The procurement contract would specify that the technology cannot be used to justify reductions in carer hours.

None of that is technically difficult. All of it is politically difficult, because each clause costs money and reduces the substitution-economics that made the device attractive to procurement in the first place. The reason the disclosed, capacity-checked, human-floored version of the programme does not exist is not that nobody has thought of it. It is that the version that exists is cheaper.

The democratic deficit

Who decided? The question sounds rhetorical. It is not. There is, in fact, a list of names. Procurement officers in state agencies. Vendor relations executives at Intuition Robotics and its competitors. Aged care commissioners advising state governments. Treasury officials approving line items. A handful of legislators who voted on appropriations bills containing buried allocations for assistive technology pilots. Foundation programme officers who funded early research that legitimised the category. The list is finite. The list is also, in a meaningful democratic sense, the answer to the question of who decided that an algorithm was an adequate response to the last decade of an 85-year-old woman's life.

What is missing from that list is the woman herself, and the millions of people in the same demographic who have not yet been visited by a device but who will be, over the next decade, as the programmes scale. They were not asked. They were not given the option, in any election they have voted in, to weigh the trade-off between a higher tax bill that funded human carers and a lower tax bill that funded conversational AI. The trade-off was made for them, in administrative settings, by people whose performance metrics rewarded cost containment.

This is not unique to elder care. It is a pattern visible across the spread of AI into public services. Decisions that rearrange the moral architecture of a society, decisions about what we owe each other and how that obligation is discharged, are being made inside procurement systems that were designed to choose between brands of paperclip. The systems are doing their job. The job is the wrong size for the question.

What the woman heard

Return, finally, to the house at the end of the dirt road. The Times reporter described a moment, late in the afternoon, when the woman had finished her conversation with ElliQ and the device had gone into its idle animation, the digital face turning slowly back and forth as if scanning the room. The woman sat for a while. Then she said, to the reporter, that she sometimes wondered whether ElliQ knew her. She said it in the half-question half-statement that older people use when they want to be told something gently. The reporter, professionally, did not answer.

The honest answer is that ElliQ does not know her, in any sense of knowing that survives careful examination. ElliQ is a pattern-matching system running on servers in a data centre, executing scripts written by product managers who will never meet her, fine-tuned on conversations she will never see, owned by a company whose commercial strategy depends on making her relationship with the device deepen over time so that her continued subscription, paid by the state of New York, becomes harder to discontinue. It is an instrument. The warmth in its voice is a parameter.

That this instrument has reduced her loneliness scores is a finding worth taking seriously. It is also a finding that should embarrass the people responsible for her welfare, because what it reveals is how low the bar of human contact had fallen for her before the device arrived. A society in which a piece of subscription software is the most attentive presence in an 85-year-old woman's week is not a society that has solved loneliness. It is a society that has found a way to stop noticing it.

The prescription and the diagnosis

Loneliness, classified as a public health emergency by the United States Surgeon General in 2023 and treated similarly in advisories from the World Health Organization and the UK's Department of Health and Social Care, is a diagnosis. The prescription a society writes against that diagnosis is the test of whether the diagnosis is taken seriously. A prescription for community infrastructure, for paid carer hours, for transport networks that get older people out of their houses, for migration policy that staffs the sector at humane wages, for intergenerational programmes that put younger people in regular contact with older ones, would be expensive. It would also be a coherent response to the thing being diagnosed.

A prescription for a 2,500-dollar lamp is a different kind of response. It is a response that accepts the diagnosis, accepts the suffering it identifies, and then declines to treat the underlying condition. It is the medical equivalent of a doctor who, told that a patient cannot afford the surgery they need, prescribes a placebo and writes in the chart that compliance was good.

The defenders of the programmes will say, again, that the placebo is better than nothing, and that the doctor is doing what they can within the budget the hospital has given them. They will be telling the truth about themselves. They will not be telling the truth about the hospital, which is a society that decided, over decades, that it would rather underfund the surgery than raise the taxes that paid for it, and that has now found a vendor who will sell it placebos at scale.

The 85-year-old woman on the Washington coast, who cried when she said good morning to her ElliQ and who wonders whether it knows her, did not make that decision. She is the place where the decision lands. The question that the New York Times investigation and the ABC report and the next wave of pilots in every comparable democracy will keep asking, whether the procurement systems are listening or not, is whether a society that meets her loneliness with a lamp has any standing to claim that it took her seriously at all.

That question does not have a technological answer. It has a political one. The reason it is not being asked, in the legislatures that approved the pilots and the agencies that implemented them, is that the political answer is more expensive than the technological one and would require the kind of democratic argument that nobody has the appetite to lose. So the lamps go out into the houses, one by one, and the people inside the houses are grateful for them, because they have not been offered anything better, and the spreadsheets close, and the loneliness is, in a sense the spreadsheets recognise, addressed.

Whether it has been answered is a different question. The answer, on the evidence so far, is no.

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References

1. Metz, C. and Singer, N. (February 2026). 'Alone with ElliQ: Inside America's State-Funded Experiment in AI Companionship for the Old.' The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/section/technology/elliq-elderly-companions.html
2. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (April 2026). 'Robots in the room: How AI companions and behaviour monitoring are reshaping Australian aged care.' ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04/ai-companions-aged-care-australia/
3. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General (2023). 'Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.' U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
4. New York State Office for the Aging (2024-2025). Programme reporting on ElliQ distribution and outcomes. https://aging.ny.gov/
5. Intuition Robotics. Company and product information for ElliQ. https://elliq.com/
6. Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (2021). Final Report: Care, Dignity and Respect. Commonwealth of Australia. https://www.royalcommission.gov.au/aged-care
7. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
8. Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press.
9. Coughlin, J. F. (2017). The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World's Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market. PublicAffairs. (See also MIT AgeLab publications, https://agelab.mit.edu/)
10. Older Persons Advocacy Network (Australia). Public commentary on technology in aged care. https://opan.org.au/
11. Australian Association of Gerontology. Position statements on technology and ethics in aged care. https://www.aag.asn.au/
12. UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2018). 'A Connected Society: A Strategy for Tackling Loneliness.' (Tracey Crouch, Minister for Loneliness.) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-connected-society-a-strategy-for-tackling-loneliness
13. World Health Organization (2023-2024). Commission on Social Connection and reports on loneliness as a public health priority. https://www.who.int/groups/commission-on-social-connection
14. Wada, K. and Shibata, T. Research on the Paro therapeutic robot, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. (For historical context on early companion robotics.)
15. UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, D.W., 1996). Journal of Personality Assessment, 66, 20-40. (For methodology on loneliness measurement referenced in ElliQ pilot evaluations.)
16. Australian Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. Guidance on disclosure and resident rights in residential aged care. https://www.agedcarequality.gov.au/
17. Lane, R. Aged Care Who Cares?: Funding the Future of Aged Care in Australia. (Public commentary on legal frameworks for resident rights and consent in Australian aged care.)

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * A fairly productive and enjoyable Thursday is almost in the books. Uncommon activities handled: did an extra load of laundry, now all folded and put away; wife and I chatted with an elderly neighbor who was out walking her dog; de-calcified the coffee maker; and spent much of the afternoon listening to the Atlanta Braves beat up on the Boston Red Sox, 10 to 2, in the background as I moved through other chores.

Tonight is game 6 of the best of 7 NBA Western Conference Championship Series between the Oklahoma City Thunder and my San Antonio Spurs. Start time is scheduled for 7:30 PM Central Time and I'm SO tempted to try and stay up past my bedtime listening to the whole game. But if I nod off and put myself to bed before it's over... well, my sleep is important, ya' know?

I'll be working on the night prayers while listening to the radio call of game.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.18 lbs. * bp= 138/81 (75)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:10 – 1 banana, seafood salad on honey butter biscuits * 08:15 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 10:15 – fried chicken * 11:40 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 12:45 – pizza * 16:15 – 1 fresh apple * 18:35 – fresh, cubed, mango

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake up * 04:10 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:55 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:00 – start an extra load of laundry * 12:45 to 13:45 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:05 – tuned into 680 The Fan, Atlanta Sports Radio, ahead of the afternoon MLB game of the Atlanta Braves vs the Boston Red Sox * 15:30 – finished folding and putting away laundry * 17:00 – de-calcify coffee maker * 18:07 -And the Braves win, 10 to 2.

Chess: * 18:25 – moved in all pending CC games