Lot of people are worried about what AI is going to do to their industry, to their jobs. That’s a big part of why I went into senior living. I don’t have a lot to say about AI other than I don’t much care for it, and I don’t see much need for it in my own life. I find most discussions of it tedious and I’d like not to think about it very much. If you work in senior living, you really do have to be a person in the same room as another person. You’ve got to give that person a shower, dose out their medication, present them with dinner, drive them to the doctor, read aloud, play chair volleyball with them yourself. That’s the kind of work I like to do.
Every once in a while a resident will ask if we’re ever getting a robot server in the dining room. They don’t ask about it often — not like they ask about acoustic tiles, which comes up just about every day, or when we’re getting a new coffee machine — but whenever a regular server goes on FMLA or vacation, it comes up. “We getting any robots soon?”
Then it trickles up into the morning manager’s meeting: “Residents want to know if we’re getting any robots in the dining room.”
“I don’t know about that. All those walkers, all those wheelchairs…what if the robot gets in somebody’s way, and they fall?”
“They don’t do that. They use light radar. They stop.”
“We had one when I was at Barksdale.”
“Can we get back to the question of when Angelo1 is coming back?”
“Angelo’s not coming back.”
General consternation. What are we going to do without him?
Every once in a while I see a delivery robot in Berkeley and I feel vicious. I want to knife it, kick it into the street, hear its robotic little squeal of distress. I don’t feel that way about seeing new point-of-sale systems. Just delivery robots. I don’t know why. I like tap-to-pay fine; I like it when my phone autofills in a confirmation code that’s just been texted to me.
I’ve got a buddy who’s a radiologist who says AI helps him a lot. I don’t remember how. I believe him, and I’m happy for him. I want radiologists to have an easier time of things.
We’ve got like fifteen touchscreen computers down in storage from pilot program a few years back called something like “Apptown.” Apptown has since been rebranded as something like “Monoguest.” I don’t know what they used them for. They were discontinued a few months before I got hired. We also have a ton of yarn down there, but people actually use that. We’ve got a pretty good-sized knitting and crochet group that meets on Sunday in the living room.
The nice thing about an anecdote like this is it makes both the writer and the reader (that’s you and me!) feel pleasantly smug. Yarn, that’s eternal. AI, that’s gonna end up like Touchbot 3000, moldering away down in the basement, gathering dust. We know not to lose our heads whenever they come out with a shiny new model. Doesn’t it feel good to know you’re not the sort to lose your head?
Residents answer their phones at work like you wouldn’t believe. In the middle of the dining room, in the middle of my workout class, in the middle of reading Anton Chekhov’s short story “Misery.” They’ll answer them on speakerphone!
This is one of the few areas where my sense of decorum differs from theirs. Usually we’re on the same page about punctuality, handshake pressure, eye contact, that sort of thing. I have to call people to arrange medical transportation, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had this exact conversation:
RESIDENT: Hello?
ME: Hi, I’m just calling about your ride for tomorrow —
RESIDENT: I’m in the dining room/ceramics class/a lecture/meditation.
ME: Oh, my God.
RESIDENT: So we’ll have to keep this short.
ME: No, I’ll call you back later.
One of the residents I’m closest with, she told me the other day, “I ask ChatGPT for information five times a day. Then I double-check it with Claude.” I didn’t really know what to say to that.
Later that same day, I’m configuring our trip back from San Francisco on Maps, and she says, “Check it on ChatGPT!” Listen, I’m already on the computer. I don’t need to be on the computer any more than I already am.
It’s not that I mind being on the computer. I like the computer plenty. I just don’t think I need anything more from it than what it already gives me.
I’ve got other residents who tell me, “Don’t bother calling me. I have a phone, I don’t use it. You can come find me if you have something to say to me.”
Some people — this includes staff as well as residents — will watch those godawful AI Youtube narrative videos, the ones where this incredibly monotonous robot voice tells you AND THE WOMAN SAW HER MOTHER IN THE COURT ROOM while a series of unrelated images flash past. They’ll do it in the dining room, the break room. No headphones, of course. I feel like I’m having a heart attack every time I see it. Like I’m being knifed.
One of my coworkers played me some music, then told me she got AI to generate it for her.
Other day, I was talking to someone else and I could see they had a conversation saved with a chatbot about why they should get a raise during the next merit increase. “You haven’t just created value…”
All right. I don’t know. I hope it helps, I guess.
Relatives are always hopeful that those AI-enhanced iPads will generate more useful reminders. “I got her this new iPad that will remind her when exercise starts.” I hope it does too, but in the meantime I’ll just run upstairs and knock on the door.
We’ve got this internal calendar-building and message-sending system we have to use at work. Call it ActiviDay. It generates, among other things, a daily trivia-and-puzzle handout I use during the coffee hour.
It’s mostly pretty useful, but then it’ll do something like generate an AI photo of Mae West wearing a sexy fedora, which drives me crazy, because we know what Mae West looked like. We already have photos of her. She wore cloches and I think a few times she wore a Gainsborough hat when she did those Gay ‘90s pictures, but she didn’t wear fedoras.
[PBS]
Or there will be a little factoid about the person of the day, and you never get any real details about their life, just that they “taught people” or “showed the world” how to lead with grace, or create with confidence, shit like that.
Once, last year, at the last minute I was asked to fill in for a speaker to give a presentation on Martin Luther King Day and I couldn’t figure out why the presentation didn’t include anything like dates or names or locations or real, concrete information, and about halfway through I realized it was all AI-generated. Just vague sentiment. Martin Luther King taught the world how to lead with grace. And he changed the world. And he was always there.
I don’t like that sort of thing. I like to pick the movies we play every night myself. I think about it careful, I take other people’s tastes into consideration, and I like movies. I want to do a good job of it. And if I’ve got to give a last-minute presentation about somebody, I’d like to be able to tell you where he lived.
I’ve got a regular group of about thirty-five residents now who meet with me on Monday afternoons to read a short story together. I’ll print out the story, and I’ll read it aloud, and I’ll print a glossary of any technical terms, historical context, a little bit about the author, maybe a passage or two from some complementary texts.
Here’s what we’ve read so far. Lots of middlebrow, middle-century New Yorker stuff, which I think is terrific, but we sometimes cast a wider net:
Shirley Jackson, “Charles”
Donald Barthelme, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
Edna Ferber, “Old Man Minick”
Daniel Orozco, “Orientation”
Lydia Davis, “Five Stories”
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use”
Grace Paley, “Friends”
James Joyce, “The Sisters”
Grace Paley, “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Wait”
Kathryn Scanlan, “Kick the Latch”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Anton Chekhov, “Misery”
Lorrie Moore, “How to Talk to Your Mother”
And of course I want to throw in some charming, humane little details that will make us all think, “I’d like to see AI recreate the glint in Paul’s eyes as he describes the Santa Anita Racetrack….I’d like to see AI showing up whenever a cop’s beating up a guy! I’d like to see AI bein’ all aroun’ in the dark, wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper is ready!” So I suppose I’d better not.
The upside to all this is that I get to feel embattled, misunderstood, and superior, which of course I always enjoy. The last of the Romans, me.
Never anybody’s real name.
Many of my colleagues have strong ethical objections to AI, and I can't say I'm in favour of it, either, but morality aside, I simply don't see what it *does*. I have a friend who routinely uses it to generate spreadsheets and summaries and things, but they come out full of errors and I'm very certain he could have made them from scratch in the time it takes to correct the things. I've tried chatting to it a bit out of curiosity, but it doesn't feel like anything is talking back, at least not to me personally. But then I've also been thinking about buying cheap headphones to hand to people using their phones with volume on the subway, and I nearly glared at someone for being inappropriately dressed at the opera the other day, so admittedly it's all a bit o tempora o mores over here.