Hillhead Review

Your new best friend is closer than you think. In fact, it’s hanging around your neck. 

The ‘friend’ AI necklace, founded by Harvard drop-out Avi Schiffman at only twenty-one, listens to everything around you, collecting data to later tell you its expert opinions on your conversations, relationships, and day to day interactions. Connecting to user’s phones through Bluetooth, this necklace can quite literally talk to you. With ‘friend’ you’ll never truly be alone again.

Your new roommate is waiting. I’ll never bail on dinner plans. These are just some of the slogans preying on the lonely and isolated. 

‘friend’ is something out of a Black Mirror episode, its existence goes beyond my wildest nightmares. 

Remnant of 1984’s Big Brother, ‘friend’ listens to everything it hears- after which you can check the app in your phone to see what it has to say. The wearer is supposed to use this to analyse conversations with other people, as well as speaking directly to the necklace to gain responses to their thoughts, gossip, or concerns. Schiffman, creator of ‘friend’, states that ‘Maybe your girlfriend breaks up with you, and you’re wearing a device like this: I don’t think there’s any amount of money you wouldn’t pay in that moment to be able to talk to this friend that was there with you about what you did wrong, or something like that.’ 

The power of ‘friend’ supposedly lies in its ability to know every tiny detail about your life, in a way that none of your human friends could. Its perfection lies in its constant 24/7 availability. We see this desire for complete convenience everywhere; you can order whatever kind of food you want to your house within half an hour with a click of a button, we order from screens to avoid speaking to staff because it is so much faster. These breakthroughs in technology are creating a deep-rooted lack of patience, a sinister hatred for human error.

While it’s becoming common on social media to use Chat GPT as a therapist, this takes it several steps further.

The things that make people human are becoming looked down on. Humans are not as efficient or as hardworking or as convenient as machines, and for this we are trying to eradicate all signs of humanity from society.

Retailed at $129, it’s surprisingly less expensive than I would’ve imagined. The accessibility of this gadget, a tenth of the price of the latest MacBook, contributes to its terrifying reality. 

The existence of culture is dependent on our interactions and co-existence with each other. Art, music, film, TV; it is all formed from the error of humanity. We say the wrong things, we make mistakes, we argue, we fall in love and fall out of love. There isn’t an algorithm that can replace these experiences, nor is there an algorithm that can perfect human interaction into a bastardised replica.

For now, ‘friend’ pendants are only available in the US and Canada. As such a new product, with only 1000 pendants having been shipped thus far, it’s unclear how popular it will become, and whether this popularity will end up jumping across the pond. I personally question how widespread usage would work legally, can ‘friend’ testify in court like a human witness could? What are the ethical and legal implications of listening to people who don’t realise their words are being recorded? Our generation is watching the AI world unfold, so much is still unknown. 

Afterall, can we really trade something as sacred as our closest human relationships for a tiny, metal device?