💬 The dead have entered the chat

Today, we’re gonna get sci-fi and talk about “singularity.”

While the term appears across math and science, we specifically mean “technological singularity.”

‘It was the machines, Sarah’

So, Terminator: Tech company Cyberdyne Systems builds Skynet, an AI-powered defense network. Skynet becomes self-aware, builds an army of machines, enslaves humankind, and sends a cyborg assassin back in time to kill the mother of humanity’s savior.

That’s singularity: when AI becomes smarter than its creators, capable of improving itself and building technology more advanced than we ever could.

Cool, so when will that be?

Not today. Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT are impressive, but often give us silly or wrong answers. They’re also meh at creative endeavors, derivative of the data they’re fed.

But Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, thinks singularity is already coming — and will be here by 2045.

So, the machines are def going to end us

Not necessarily. For every Terminator or M3gan, there’s an R2-D2 or Data (a crucial member of Starfleet!).

The optimistic view — one shared by Kurzweil — is that we’d work in tandem with machines to better ourselves and society.

Yet other experts worry:

• An open letter to temporarily stop developing AI more powerful than GPT-4 has garnered signatures from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and Getty Images CEO Craig Peters.
• AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton exited Google to openly discuss the risks posed by the technology he pioneered.
• In 2021, 193 countries agreed to UNESCO’s recommendations on the ethics of AI to help establish a global standard for regulation.

But all in all? Time will tell. (Eyes phone suspiciously.)

For those of you who crave cringey ‘90s commercials with unforgivably forced punchlines: Today’s your lucky day.

Son: “Dad, I want a pager. I’m never gonna take it to school, and your pages come first.”

Dad: “You’d do that for me? Would you do something else for me? Shave.”

Oof…

Sure, pagers had their moments with teens, businesspeople, and doctors, and are certainly past their prime.

But they’re not obsolete — not even close, according to The Wall Street Journal. For today’s doctors, studies show phones have overtaken pager use, though there are still many who use the one-way, beeping communication devices, and, uh, TikTok about them, too.

Spok, a US company that makes pagers and other communication technology for health care providers, says 800k+ of its pagers are in use today, down from 6.6m in 2004.

• In total, Spok, whose stock is up ~56% year-to-date, helps staff at 2.2k+ hospitals send 100m+ messages every month. In Q1, among the company’s ~$33.2m in revenue, $18.5m came from paging.

Flipping off the past

In recent years, many tech oldies have returned as consumer goodies. Relative Google search interest in disposable cameras was far greater in 2022 than in 2004; Samsung is out there pushing its Galaxy Z Flip phones; heck, we’ve done a deep dive on the resurgence of vinyl.

The lessons here: First, keep holding on to that iPod Shuffle in the nostalgia box under your bed.

Second, watch yourself some ‘90s and ‘00s commercials — there’s just something about those Betty Crocker ads that hit different.

You can’t put a price on closure, but one Chinese funeral company is trying anyway.

Fu Shou Yuan International Group is charging families ~$7.3k to produce digital representations of deceased loved ones using ChatGPT.

Advanced technology being used to sidestep the finality of death isn’t anything new — from consciousness-uploading startups to life span-extension biotech to, let’s say, a solid half of “Black Mirror” premises — but it doesn’t mean anyone’s ready for the griefbot wave.

What are griefbots exactly?

Ever use AOL Instant Messenger? Well, imagine having a casual convo on there — just with a disembodied version of your late loved one.

That’s what’s on offer here: feed a person’s writings and info into an AI program, generate a somewhat faithful replication of their personality, then “communicate” with them.

Soon to launch in this space is Seance AI, which — yep — what it’s going for is all right there in the name. What sticks out most about it, though, is its brevity.

• Meant to be more like an “AI-generated Ouija board for closure, rather than a means of immortality,” per Futurism, Seance AI sees itself as a limited-time-only emotional processing tool.
• Seance AI says it prefers a pay-per-session model over a monthly subscription model to discourage users from communing with the dead too often.

That sets it apart from prominent avatar services HereAfter and Replika, which produce AI replicas often used for long-term communications.

Grief evolves with technology

The wide adoption of photography changed mourning by bringing images of the deceased into homes; this is just the latest evolution.

And with increasingly sophisticated AI tools producing better approximations, griefbots will only get more convincing.

Whether they’ll ultimately offer more satisfying goodbyes, or leave people feeling even emptier — that’s anyone’s guess.