I read a story the other day from a person who grew up in the 80s and 90s, and always had “hilarious“ voicemail and answering machine messages. But they recently realized that nobody leaves voicemails anymore, except for Robocallers and bots. So they gave up on the funny answering machine messages, and set their voicemail to the default robot one. For whatever reason, that really resonated with me on the state of our world today. Robots talking to other robots.

And then I remembered an article I read about six months ago. A software engineer is working on code that would allow AI agents to talk to each other using beeps and boobs and squeals. It sounds like an old fax machine trying to connect. And autonomous AI Agents have been observed spontaneously inventing compact symbolic language, and deviating from English grammar constructs to favor more efficient communication.

Remember when blog posts were cool? Humans, writing thoughts and words in an emerging technological platform. Sharing experiences with other humans around the world. It made the world seem smaller, and bigger at the same time. A self-published autobiography, or a personal journal made public, holding its author somehow accountable despite anonymity. We’ve come a long way since video killed the radio star.

Anyways, I deleted my custom voicemail greeting a few minutes ago.