Many moons ago, I wrote a not very serious guide to using emoji to express sympathy. What an innocent time that was. In 2026, you need to wonder if the eulogy you’re hearing was written by artificial intelligence. Dan Brooks writes:

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI…His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.

Writing demonstrates care. Don’t let A.I. take that away from you.

Brooks goes on to say:

I don’t want [friendships] to become more efficient for the same reason I don’t want a robot that pets the dog for me.

I think the idea of a robot that pets the dog for me is a powerful one, and it encompasses far, far too much of how folks are using A.I.

Soon after Sebastian Heyneman left a suspicious-looking hardware device unattended at the World Economic Forum, he found himself in a very fancy jail. Eventually, he was asked to explain the device.

I say, “Look, I’m not a very good hardware engineer, but I’m a great user of AI.” I was one of the top users of [AI coding tool] Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens.

We open my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don’t know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me.

Not even knowing what coding language the software was written in is perhaps the most horrifying part of this.

Speaking of morbid Chinese silliness, a new app in China is growing in popularity:

The idea is simple: check in every day by tapping the big green button on the app’s homepage. Fail to check in for 48 hours and it will email the emergency contact you registered during set-up.

Its awful but brilliant name is “Are You Dead?”. That bluntness has bothered some (including, apparently, the Chinese government), but it seems to me that the problem isn’t the name so much as the fact that such an app is indeed useful.

The CES trade show wraps up today, and the 2026 Worst in Show awards are out. If an AI companion advertised as “your always-on 3D soulmate” isn’t the most dystopian thing you read this week, please don’t tell me what is.

This is Kumma:

Adorable, no? Look at its little scarf! But as the text under that furry little butt indicates, Kumma is an AI-enabled teddy bear. According to manufacturer FoloToy, this bear:

…combines advanced artificial intelligence with friendly, interactive features, making it the perfect friend for both kids and adults. From lively conversations to educational storytelling, FoloToy adapts to your personality and needs…

If you need advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives, Kumma apparently had you covered. As a result, Kumma is no longer available for purchase.

It seems to me that the world is not in a great place right now. Here in America, the government has been shut down for weeks, and even when it’s open, it’s being run by a wannabe dictator, with too few checks or balances from his feckless followers. On the internet, social media algorithms drive negative effects on mental health, political polarization, and the spread of misinformation. Globally, the very real effects of climate change are being seen and felt in ways big and small, while humanity seems incapable of dealing with such a big problem and the collective action it requires.¹

We should all buck up though, because uber-rich Jeff Bezos sees no reason for anyone, anywhere, to be discouraged.

Jeff Bezos Says He Doesn’t Understand Why Anybody Alive Now Would Be ‘Discouraged’—Because Soon, ‘Millions Of People Will Be Living In Space’

“Will this make me sound like an out-of-touch mega-billionaire?” Bezos ought to have wondered, but apparently did not.

Right now, we all live on the perfect place for human life.² Rather than attempting to send millions of people to live in space, it would be really great if we could focus on making life easier for the people who live on planet Earth, as well as not destroying our home.

Footnotes:

1. A couple years back, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “We Are The Weather”, which proposed that we can avert the worst outcomes by having fewer children, eating fewer animal products, and flying less. Though I do what I can here myself, I am not optimistic about that happening at a wide enough scale. ↩︎

2. Well, almost all. ↩︎

To quote one of the excessive number of Baltimore County police officers who responded to an erroneous computer-generated alert of a student with a weapon which was in fact a bag of chips, “A.I.’s not the best”.

Speaking of overengineered nonsense, Monday’s AWS outage left smart beds from Eight Sleep stuck in position and refusing to cool down.

Online daters are using artificial intelligence to assist them, and boy howdy, outsourcing all human connection to ChatGPT doesn’t sound sociopathic at all. Nope, that‘s just a real time-saver.

ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. “Then it gave me some options for what the message could be,” says Rich. “Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency,” the bot advised. “Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you’ve got one] – good to meet you!”

“[S]till laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you’ve got one]”!¹ What are we even doing here?

Footnotes:

1. “People need to know about the [CAN EAT MORE]”² ↩︎

2. The relevant Futurama clip is archived here. ↩︎