Superficial Intelligence

Your chance to ask an expert technologist for help with everyday problems. Zero AI.

I’m sorry to hear that your grandma is unhappy during this transition, but I have good news: Technology can, and should, solve all of her problems.

First, the basics. Set your grandma up with a smartphone and/or tablet for regular video calls. She’ll love seeing your face, and she’ll be able to send and receive messages too, making her feel less isolated.

Better yet, get your grandma on Signal, an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform which will keep her messages safe from prying eyes. She can share dubious anti-vax research or pictures of the inside of her purse without fear of interception.

But your grandma is 90 years old, which raises an important practical consideration: enemies. You can’t live for nearly a century without making a few.

Using your grandma’s existing phone number to create her Signal account would make it relatively easy for her enemies to learn her location. Your grandma should therefore purchase a deck of 52 SIM cards, ask her bridge partner to shuffle them thoroughly, and select one at random to create her new Signal account.

Next, to keep your grandma looped into current events and culture, set her up on social media. But avoid TikTok, Instagram or X at all costs — each of those will leave your grandma vulnerable to the whims of a single corporate overlord. Actually, probably the safest thing to do is to get your grandma on decentralized social networks as soon as possible.

Mastodon might be a good fit, since your grandma would be able to choose from thousands of “servers” through which to join the world of decentralized social media known as the fediverse. What better way for your grandma to take part in communities focused on things like free and open source software, the Ruby programming language, or Glasgow?

But Mastodon is limited in its portability, meaning that if your grandma ever gets fed up with Glasgow and wants to change servers, she risks losing her fediverse followers. That’s why I’d recommend Nostr, a protocol by an anonymous developer which is fully portable, and mostly used by crypto traders.

It couldn’t be easier to get started: Just generate a cryptographic key pair using a command line utility and load it into one of dozens of Nostr clients. Once your grandma has done that, her crochet pictures will really stand out against the infinite feed of Bitcoin updates.

But make sure an orderly doesn’t throw away the sticky note with her Nostr key pair on it, because losing it would lock her out of her accounts forever.

Social media is a great way to pass the time, but in case she is refusing to put her phone down or leave her room, don’t worry – there’s an easy fix. Get your whole family to join your grandma in the metaverse on Meta Quest 3 VR headsets. Sitting around the virtual campfire, listening to her virtual grandkids strumming virtual guitars will kill two birds with one stone: Show your grandma how much you all love her, and that she doesn’t need an IRL hug, after all.

Beware: If your grandma is anything like me, the headset might cause her slight dizziness, neck pain, and disorientation after wearing it for more than ten days without a break. And that brings us to her biological hardware, which at 90 is likely increasingly buggy. To maintain your grandma’s continued connection to you and the world at large, perform an upgrade as soon as possible.

I’m talking, of course, about gathering up all the data you can lay your hands on — email accounts, home videos, eggnog recipes — and uploading your grandma to the cloud. We’re in a golden age of AI platforms that will not only digitally replicate but improve upon your grandma’s personality, letting you fine-tune her sadness away through the drag of a slider bar.

So if you really care about your grandma’s problems, the solution is simple: Replace her with an eternally happy and accessible GrandmaBot. What a time to be alive!

Illustration by Tammy Lian