An AI researcher talks Facebook Friend Suggestions

Blankety-blank (he asked for his name to be redacted) was an AI researcher. He was humble. That wasn’t the problem. He said he hadn’t been in the field long. But he certainly knew more than I.

I asked him about my obsession, “Facebook Friend Suggestions.”

This is what he said:

“Now, don’t get me started on that. I was a young man once. Just as you see and hear me now, I could walk, talk, even run a smite, just as any 30-year-old could. But not anymore.

You look surprised. You don’t have to hide it.

You say, what? I don’t look a tad under twenty?

Well, you know, that’s a lie, sir.

Why, when I went back into my office several weeks—was it weeks, only?—why it seems like, well, to be honest, it seems like years, decades.

I know I’ve aged decades.

Decades?

Centuries, it’s been.

Witness this white hair. These creases running up and down my face. This moist eye. This feeble, drooping hand.

Why, I would take myself for my own grandfather.

Grandfather?

Why, it looks, to be honest with you, friend, as if I’ve just risen out of cerecloths and ashes—or from the grave itself.

Now, admit it, friend.”

What could I say but that he did look a little rumpled, fatigued even? But, I said, all of us had our bad days.

“Bad days? Why if I hadn’t stumbled onto those Facebook Friend Suggestions, if I hadn’t happened to open the first one. Cursed be the day that I did so. You said you’d had some problems with them?”

I told him about my earlier articles, in which I’d written about research that showed many of them were scams, designed to appeal to your senses, get you hooked on viewing young, unclad women, then starting up dialogues in which you’d eventually get reamed.

“That? That’s nothing,” he said. His eyes flashed up for a minute, from deep dark caverns, the first sign of real life I’d seen from him. He continued:

“I had the same experience. We all have! Why, if I had a nickel for every yokel who’s fallen for those hokum ‘friend suggestions,’ only to find out they were a scam or generated by AI even, I’d be a billionaire several times over.”

He went on:

“But me! Me! Ah, woe is me! I thought I’d be different. I wouldn’t fall for that scam. I would research those ‘friend suggestions’—and I did.

Let me tell you.

The result?

The result of just a few weeks of that ‘research’ has left me in the state of utter debility and mental incapacity you see before you.

Witness the world!”

He held out his hands, which I could now see were shaking violently, horrifically.

“Witness the world’s wrath!” he said again.

He took off a cap he had been wearing, I thought to keep off the cold.

His hair was gone—only white flakes nestled over his brow and above his ears where he had combed it down. His dome was flat and brown—with age.

“You look surprised. Be not so. I will a tale unfold that will harrow up your insides with fear and make you quake even in your deepest sleep,” he said.

I was all ears. My pen was going constantly. God forbid that I should lose the audio recording, that my digital audio recorder should fail now!

“Yes, you begin to see the stakes here,” he said. “Well, I will tell you. I began my research clandestinely. Simple conversations with friends. Had they received any ‘friend suggestions?’

They all had.

I published a paper. No matter which journal. I would not give that away for the life of me—it’s already nearly taken my life.”

The first change

He paused. Then went on, again.

“Well, after I published my paper, things began to change. I had been receiving upwards of twenty ‘friend suggestions’ a day—all of them from beautiful, but quite pale and sickly-looking young women—as if they needed help.

In my—uh—research mode, I had of course perused them carefully.

In some cases, even highlighting or magnifying parts of their bodies—for research purposes only.

Was I being manipulated?

Could I measure my heartbeat, my respiration, my oxygen saturation levels as I viewed the different body parts?

I found I was—I was being manipulated.

I published my findings—as I said.”

Again, he paused and took a long, baleful look at me. Then he continued.

“The results were muted. Very little academic feedback. But that is to be expected, of course. No one really is interested in what human beings write these days, anyway. They all want to learn from the machine—AI.”

He paused again, and sighed—deeply.

“Well, no sooner had my article gone out into cyberspace, however, than things changed radically—and I mean radically, friend.

All—and I mean all—Facebook Friend Suggestions stopped.

They stopped.

Had the machine gotten a glimpse of my publishing?

Had it ‘read’ and ingested my wonderings?

I had nothing in my inbox for days.”

He fixed me with a long and hard look, almost as if he doubted I would believe him. Then he continued.

“Then—then—and I hesitate to tell you this—I can see you are looking upon me askance already.

Mad? No, not mad. I certainly felt so.

But, friend, I have proof, solid proof I’ve brought with me. Let me find it for you. Just a minute. Look at my inbox here—this inbox here—No, here—

Why, it was just here a moment ago.

A moment!

Why, it’s vanished.

Vanished, I tell you!”

He stopped and stared fixedly—this time into space. Then continued.

“It’s—why—it can only be the latest part of a plot—okay, okay, I’ll back up. I can see by your eyes you trust me, at least want to hear my story.

Okay, so where was I?

Yes, yes, I started to wonder why there were no more ‘friend suggestions.’

And right after I had published a paper about those very, cursed ‘friend suggestions.’

Had Meta been reading my scholarship?

Did it have a team that monitored news published about it online?

Friend, as crazy as those thoughts sound to you now, they sounded much more to me then as they ricocheted through my empty brain.

Soul! It was enough to drive the soul out of a man, much less an AI researcher—to be faced with questions like that.

I mean, suddenly for the flow of ‘friend suggestions’ to stop after what must have been months—simply after I’d published a single article about them.”

He paused, again. Then continued.

“It was enough to drive even the sanest man batty.

I thought of writing to Meta. But they never answer—or rarely.

I thought of publishing another article—but who would have published it?

In the end, I did nothing—which was the worst thing I could have done—perhaps.

A week later, it happened.

A single ‘friend suggestion’ showed up in my inbox.

It was no longer from some pretty, albeit sickly-looking Asian woman. I could tell, from the superscript. The name looked somehow familiar. Dare I open it?”

From the grave?

He paused and seemed to rise a little from his chair.

“I ask you, gentlemen, or so I addressed myself to the jury of public opinion in my mind, would you have been able to resist after all that time—and after all you (I mean ‘I’) had been through, real or imagined?

Suffice it to say, I did.

I opened it.

I was struck immediately by the resemblance of the photo to a lad I had known in high school who had passed away suddenly from a serious disease.

I looked more closely—the resemblance was striking.

But what could be my horror when I looked again at the name—this time letting it sink in fully—to find it was indeed nothing other than the very name of the dead boy—who I had known decades earlier and whose tombstone I had visited?

What’s more, to my growing horror (I had never known the truth of the proverb of hair ‘standing up on the top of your head’) when I saw there as an invitation ‘to chat.’”

He stopped again and put his face in his hands. Then, partially raising it, began again.

“There was a message, too. It said, ‘I’ve got something I want to tell you, urgently.’ It followed, cryptically, with the phrase, ‘from the other side.’

I immediately closed the page, my heart racing, my hands shaking, and my stomach rolling and gurgling.

What had I just witnessed?

I knew that scams sometimes invoked the names of dead people. Or that AI could reach to the farthest corners of the Internet to retrieve photos of dead people.”

The pamphlet

He then withdrew from his bag a small, wrinkled pamphlet.

“But my mortification was increased when I perused the cover of a pamphlet I had just been reading again—‘Is time travel possible with Quantum Physics? Is communication with the dead possible?’

The irony—or speculation—of the writer was that quantum physics could enable communication across time and space in ways we had never before imagined—because our thinking was heretofore guarded by the confines of Newtonian Physics. The writer proposed an experiment in which two particles would be ‘entangled’—which meant their charges would be linked in such a way that if the charge of one was changed, the other would react—and also change—no matter what the distance.

Such an experiment had already been proved and verified by science, he wrote.

But in this case two entangled particles would be separated by time.

One would be placed stationary somewhere on the earth. The other would be set on a 747 circling the earth in the direction of the earth’s orbit, thus placing it slightly ahead of earth time, even in a matter of nano seconds, according to the theory of relativity.

As it approached the speed of light, even if only in a sluggish pace, far from the actual coefficient of light speed, which was the actual speed of light, it would nevertheless move into a slightly different realm of time.

Both particles would be embedded in or placed on atomic clocks, which operated according to the decay of atoms, so they would show time independent from each other.

The clocks would register the difference in time between the 747 that had circled with the momentum of the earth’s orbit and the one that had remained stationary.

They would show, according to the laws of Einsteinian quantum physics, the lapse in time—the difference between the two time zones resulting from the different speeds traveled.

‘The question would be,’ according to the pamphlet. ‘Is whether or not the particles remained entangled.’

A scientist could change the charge in one while the airplane was in flight. And if the other changed its charge correspondingly, why it would show that particles could maintain entanglement across time.

‘Imagine the possibilities. Imagine the meanings. We could perhaps someday entangle more than particles. We could perhaps communicate across time,’ the writer speculated.

When I closed the pamphlet—it was written by a retired Princeton professor—I was struck with a further thought. My mind was reeling.

Could we entangle particles with people who were already dead?

I mean, could we entangle particles before they were dead and then use the remaining entangled particles to communicate with them after they had died?

AI and quantum physics—a reality?

My head was spinning. I was sweating profusely. I did not sleep a wink that night.

The next day I returned to the ‘friend suggestions.’

It was still there.

Only this time, it was substituted with a different photo of my dead friend, and a different query.

‘Just connect with me online now. I’m waiting.’

It gave a chat app and a handle.

I signed off immediately and closed my laptop.

I struggled with myself.

What if somehow AI and quantum mechanics had already been intermingled?

According to Google, they were working on this. But it was still five years away, at least.

There would be computers that would harness AI and quantum physics.

Their power would be immense.

But would it be AI in service of quantum physics—using AI to explore with immense power all the possibilities of the rudimentary science—would AI come up with experiments like the kind I had read about in the Princeton professor’s (retired) pamphlet?

Or would it be quantum physics in service of AI—AI using the principles of the discipline to learn how to ingest more data and ingest the same date in an infinite number of ways?

The answer kept me awake again—another sleepless night.

When I returned to the computer, and the dreaded inbox, I was now a wreck, not just from lack of sleep, but from the horror that the machine might have actually found a way for me to communicate with a dead person—my dead friend.

I opened the machine with horror.

A new horror

The inbox now had a new ‘friend suggestion.’

I trepidatiously opened it.

It was my name now.

And the photo was of me—or someone who looked like me—but infinitely older.

I was stooped, toothless, virtually, and leaning on a walker.

My eyes were sad and empty, and my hair was—well—as you see it now.

It slowly dawned on me—I was seeing myself as an old man, fifty, perhaps fifty years in the future.

With an audible groan, I closed the computer again but not before I had seen the invitation, once again, to chat—

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ it said.

Tongue cannot describe the anguish I went through over the next seven days.

Was age really inevitable?

I guess it was.

I had somehow imagined I would be young—or young-looking and reasonably healthy—well into my 90s.

I swam and hiked every day. I knitted—had taken it up recently—to soothe my mind and keep my hand-eye coordination sharp.

I never thought I’d look like that—or it would come to this.

A scam?

Then I had an image—an inspiration, really—the kind we rarely get.

And when we do, they come once in a lifetime and illumine our paths forever, or so it seems.

I remembered I had a friend—another AI researcher—who tested AI face recognition software that could automatically add age to a face.

I, instantly, emailed him.

‘Sure, just send me a current photo,’ he said. ‘Better yet, just look into your webcam.’

I did so.

In a few minutes, he sent me back the result—[my name] at 90.

I laughed gleefully.

For the first time in many days, I laughed.

(It was different, utterly different, than the photo used in ‘friend suggestions’ that had so startled me).

But what could be my surprise when I—now exultingly—went back to the original ‘friend suggestion’ and found that now the photo of me at 90 was the same as the one sent to me by my friend—the result of age progression software?

‘It’s all a scam,’ I thought. ‘It’s all meant to play upon our deepest fears,’ I said aloud.

I rested easily that night, friend, I can tell you, for the first time in weeks.

Because, really, I have to tell you, all the worry and anxiety had in fact aged me quite a bit already—enfeebled me so that I could hardly think straight, it seemed.

But a good night’s rest would do me good, I knew.

The damsel in the dream

But, friend, I tell you, what happened next has caused me to retire from my current role and left me as you see me now, almost an invalid.

I had the first good dream that night—weeks of sleep deprivation resulted in a deep, rich dream.

I won’t go into it, too much, except to say, well, I dreamed of a woman, the kind I had never met—and, friend, let me tell you, if I ever had, or ever do, I would be the luckiest, most fortunate man in the world.

I awoke, troubled and saddened to have gotten only a glimpse of this precious angel—and only in a dream.

She had vanished like gossamer, as they say, or like shards of glass in a broken window.

Delirious, and nearly sobbing with the loss, despairing lest I should never have hope of meeting such a woman (indeed, my heart was breaking), I went online, to distract myself—and there found a new ‘friend suggestion.’

It was, I tell you, the woman I had dreamed of—the very one.

But when I opened up the chat line—finally—trying to communicate with her—the whole thing vanished.

Now, I’ve written thousands of emails to Meta—imploring help.

But the only response is an automated reply—directing me to their frequently asked questions.

And, of course, there’s nothing there about a mere dream.

I’ve been over and over that inbox, but the whole lot of ‘friend suggestions’ has vanished.

Now, you tell me, friend, was it all a dream—or not?