Artificial Intelligence
Ifear that one day, not only will ghost stories no longer be told, but they’ll just quit existing altogether. As the old-timers become ghosts themselves, their stories may die with them and new ones may never be thought up to replace the old ones. That’s not because we’ve become more rational as a society, by any means, but because I think we’re going to be harder to scare before long.
Now that faint voice we thought we heard in an otherwise empty house can be excused away as Siri somehow giving a weather report; the bump we hear in the night is as likely to be the robot vacuum starting its rounds as it is to be some spirit wandering the halls.
Artificial Intelligence is taking away our ability to blame spirits for things; before long, “Did you hear that?”, will be automatically answered with, “It was probably your phone.” Or maybe AI is just a conspiracy of Big Ghost; maybe all the spirits got together and decided they needed to do something about all the exposure they were getting.
“Fellas, listen: they’ve got these listening devices and cameras all over the place. It’s only a matter of time before they catch one of us dead to rights.” Get it? Dead to rights?
“I’ve got an idea,” one of the other ghosts said. “Let’s make our noises sound like all of these new fangled things they’ve got and they’ll forget all about us. Jim, you reach out to that poltergeist you used to haunt with and see if he can help us.” There were some murmurs at first. Most of the attendees thought it was a dumb idea, until one of the folks living in their house asked Alexa to play Taylor Swift and then they saw how genius the plan was. It took some time, acclimating to this new way of haunting, but before long it became second nature like any habit does.
This is all speculation, obviously, but you just never know. I asked Siri about it but she said she had no information, but I guess she would say that, wouldn’t she?
