Tech-Enabled Elder Care/Neglect

It's a bit of a fool's game to figure out what someone else really thinks but when I read that some people created an "AI" (as in Awfully Inconsiderate) service to, uh, harass one's elderly parents with spam phone calls, I just had to indulge myself.

If I was a cussin' person I'd probably toss some 🤬 grawlix in right about now to express my contempt for people who thought up this idea. I'd toss in a few more for any other people who participated in designing, developing, deploying, marketing, and facilitating it in any way. And extra for anyone who enters someone else's phone number into this system without their consent.

What level of contempt must these people - developers and users - have for their parents? Though I'm not of a mind to allow it, I suppose you could make a case that some parents "deserve" to be abandoned to the tender, loving mercies (read: emotional abuse) of a service that'll - no doubt in my mind! - harvest those phone numbers and harass them for the remainder of their lives (or cell phone contracts).

Then there is the prank potential. There's a 14 day free trial (or one week or 10 calls, it's not clear). You'd still have to give them the phone numbers. But is it really your dear mummy? Or is it the school principal? Or the pizza place on Main Street? Or your ex?

I don't know what the service really costs. The website has a section that looks like it's supposed to show the subscription options but it only shows: "We couldn't fetch the price. Please try again later."

The InTouch website tries to spin a good case for its service but it just comes off sounding creepy and condescending. Even if I was so inclined, I don't think I'd sign up for a trial without knowing what the cost would be afterward.

This certainly fits my concept of the techbroligarch mindset (flawed though that might be, I admit) to believe that these people do not understand - and are not trying to understand - what healthy human connection is and why it's important. Especially when that would conflict with raking in the big bucks.

Just my two cents.

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Written and posted and copyrighted on 2025-04-19 by me. Quote me if you want (linking to this post would be nice, too) but no one and no thing have permission to slurp this into any LLM vomit factory as training data.