Pet Rocks

June 2023

Phil schizophrenically glued googly eyes onto gray river rocks that had been smoothed by decades of tumbling about underwater. A sea of these stones surrounded him, hundreds, all staring blankly with those creepy, lifeless eyes. His basement was dark—no windows—lit only by a single LED. It was the gross kind of white LED light that turns any room into that dreary gas station in the middle of nowhere that you only visit at 2 a.m. to buy a coffee while on a long drive to somewhere else.

Phil’s girlfriend heard him clamor up the stairs. The rocks in his bag knocked about loudly and weighted him such that every step was both labored and unstable. “I’m going out, they’re done.” he huffed.

“Phil, stop! This isn’t going to fix anything.” she begged.

“Someone has to do something!” He rushed out of the house without noticing her packed bags neatly arranged next to the front door. Minutes later he stood on a street corner, rocks laid out on a burlap sack at his feet. Pet Rocks: Free! his cardboard sign read in all capital letters. He sought eye contact desperately with anyone and shouted into space, “Pet rocks! They’re free! Come grab one! It’s all you need to have fun, really!” He saw a kid approaching. “Want one kid? Please, get rid of that myFriend!”

Phil pointed at the kid’s myFriend—a small anthropomorphic robot that accompanied every individual in sight. The myFriend was the first AI brought to market with a corporeal form, and it had taken off. Rich or poor, everyone had one. As it turns out, the safe and egalitarian deployment of AI had gone surprisingly well. In the mid 2020’s governments had collaborated with each other, with industry and with citizens to chart a responsible path forward with respect to AI alignment. The whole process has been smoother than even the most zealous AI apologist could have dreamed of. In fact, the integration had gone so well that AI was almost never discussed. Just as the ethics of such mundane technologies as silverware or lampshades are rarely thought important enough to talk about, so too was AI similarly classified. For when a technology becomes so ubiquitous as to make for mundane discussion, when it embeds itself so deeply in the cultural milieu and the individual soul, it becomes invisible.

But this was not so for Phil. He was convinced that the superficially smooth adoption of AI made it all the more pernicious. At first, he took to talking about it with friends. But conversation was becoming obsolete. And so he took to writing polemic after polemic, decrying the catastrophe that AI would bring about. But reading was obsolete. And so Phil took to making videos, explaining his concerns in simple terms. But consuming human-generated content was obsolete. And so Phil took to the streets, screaming his warnings to anyone within earshot. But the outdoors were quickly fading from relevance too. Besides, anyone who was outside was engrossed by his myFriend.

So the pathetic little river stones with their creepy googly eyes were Phil’s last sad attempt to do something. He had been driven to madness, stuck in the insufferable echo chamber of his own mind. He thought that just maybe, if one kid would give a pet rock a chance, she would see the beauty of simplicity, or imagination, or even of boredom. But these rocks had passed the point of mere obsolescence, they were incomprehensible artifacts of a lost age.

Each person who passed Phil without acknowledging him deepened the already vast chasm of despair in his heart. Suddenly, a kid’s myFriend stopped and looked at a rocks. “What are these?” it asked.

Phil, ignoring the myFriend, looked straight at the child, “These are pet rocks, please take one, you’ll love it!” The child stared blankly at the stones. His wide lifeless eyes were sunken into a gaunt face. Pale, pasty skin was stretched tautly over angular bones. He did not blink. He looked at Phil, the first time Phil has been looked in the eyes in seven months, two days, three hours and twenty-seven minutes.

Phil was lifted on the wings of hope. He looked into the child’s eyes with a deep expectant longing. The eyes stared back from under an empty glaze, showing no spark of interest, no fear, no recognition, no curiosity. A brief moment passed, and the child resumed his mechanical walk down the road. The myFriend piped up, “Those are cute rocks, bye now!” It trotted gingerly after the kid. That night, Phil went home and hung himself in the basement. The creepy, lifeless googly eyes of his pet rocks were all that bore witness.