The Absurdity of the World’s First Wearable AI Grandfather

I’ll start this story with some good news: the wearable AI grandfather isn’t a real product. Two NY comedians, Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, created a series of fake ads for AI companies and products that don’t actually exist and recorded a video of themselves posting these ads in NY Subway locations. Though they took them down right after recording the videos, the plausible ridiculousness of many got people commenting and sharing. Among their best:

Grandfather - The world’s first wearable AI grandfather.
Cutlery.ai - What if forks were spoons?
Wireflow - You pay us, we pay you.
Thoughts.com - Thinking just got a big upgrade.

Life seems to have blown way past imitating art these days and veering consistently toward imitating satire. Some real stories, like a sitting President trying to sell early access to his social media posts for $100k before they move financial markets, feel like they could be the punchlines to jokes only to turn out to be true.

So jokes like these posters are fun to watch, but also come with a potential downside. What if some future tech entrepreneur takes the ad as inspiration to create the exact thing the ad was meant to critique? The most famous example from more than 100 years ago was the story of inventor Elizabeth Magie, who originally created the game that inspired Monopoly as a way to warn the world against the problems of wealth inequality and monopolies. Then decades later the game was purchased and reinvented into a celebration of capitalism with the objective becoming to create your own monopoly. The pattern is one we will probably see repeating more often as the cautions shared through pranks like these posters end up becoming inspiration for myopic founders who only see the positive potential of their inventions ... and none of the likely disasters. On second thought, maybe we do need some of those AI startups those two comedians invented. Some people’s thinking could indeed use an upgrade.