My home coffee machine, the dumb one, died this morning. It wasn’t dramatic. Its water pump just slowed and stopped, and that was it. It went from a kitchen appliance to a waste management issue in the time it used to take to make my morning joe.

My coffee machine did not have a Facebook page, unlike a childhood friend of mine. His page was about a 50/50 split of insightful posts about music and sports, and hate filled political rants. He was an old friend, but I’d pushed him away over the years. He just became harder to take over time, and I guess I was too busy trying to get myself sorted out to make time to reach out.

Anyway, Facebook reminded me a few weeks ago that it was my friends birthday. He’s been dead a little more year now.

This is not him.

http://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot

But someone could do this for him. I wonder what it (he?) would say?

The technology to do this is only going to get better. And kids today, those crazy kids, are going to leave so much more material for a learning system to use to build their personalities into algorithms.

I remember reading a line about life expectancies. Something to the effect of “Statistically, your generation is going to live a long, healthy life, your children will live even longer, and their children may never die.”

I’m not sure that’s what they had in mind.