This article by David Klinghoffer is republished from Science and Culture Today.

Our colleague Andrew McDiarmid has a powerful piece in the New York Post today, with a fascinating statistic:

The data tell us that Americans are quite literally speaking to each other less. A March 2026 study demonstrated that the number of words the average person uttered fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. That’s a drop of about 330 spoken words a day, or 120,000 over the course of a year.

Silicon Valley is unworried. If anything, they’d like to see those numbers come down even more. In July, tech startup Friend launched a new iteration of its controversial AI necklace, designed to talk back to lonely users. Americans will be talking, but not to other humans.

You can thank texting, emailing, smartphones, social media, now AI, and the rest for that. The whole mess should be called anti-social media, because these “advances” are starving us of human interaction. The wearable AI necklace, Friend, that Andrew refers to opens up a whole new nightmare chapter, as you’ll see from their website.

It’s Not a Parody

Young people are supposed to wear their “Friend” on their person. It costs $249. According to the Friend site,

[F]riend is a wearable companion. Worn on a necklace, always listening.

Every friend is born with their own voice and personality. Talk back and forth out loud, or text privately in the friend app.

“Always listening…”? I’ll bet it is. The Post article includes a photo of a “Friend” ad in a subway station. It has been defaced, and now says “Go make real friends. This is surveillance!” I hate graffiti, but for that, I’ll make an exception.

There has been somewhat of a backlash, including against the subway ads. The young man who came up with the concept for Friend is “The Most Reviled Tech CEO in New York,” according to The Atlantic.

Andrew McDiarmid has become a prophetic voice warning against developments like this from the tech world. Read the rest in the New York Post.