"The New York City subway is famous for its ads. Ask any New Yorker of a certain age, and they'll tell you that Law & Order 's Jerry Orbach "gave his heart and soul to acting, and the gift of sight to two New Yorkers" by donating his eyes after death. We mourned as a city when dermatologist Dr. Zizmore, affectionately known as Dr. Z, retired and his rainbow-infused promises for clear, tight skin no longer graced our commutes."
"The pitch for this $129 AI necklace is that it's a "friend" that hangs out with you all day. There's a mic that lets it listen in on all your conversations. Every once in a while, you'll get a push notification with a running commentary of your day. If you want to interact with it, you press it as if it were one big button. There's no speaker, so it doesn't speak back to you. All of its interactions are texts"
The Friend is a $129 always-on AI necklace that passively listens through a built-in microphone and sends periodic text-only push notifications summarizing daily moments. The device has no speaker and requires pressing the pendant to send input; all responses appear as text. New York subway ad reactions ranged from graffiti reading 'Fuck AI' to 'Surveillance capitalism' and 'Get real friends,' with 'AI wouldn't care if you lived or died' scrawled on several posters. Trial use for about a month reinforced privacy and social concerns about constant audio monitoring and impersonal, text-based companionship.
Read at The Verge
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