The Algorithm Runs the Family Group Chat Now. Grandmother Has Questions

The family chat assistant summarizes our week, reminds us of birthdays, and mediates the annual argument about where to go for Diwali. Grandmother asked it to stop sending her the summaries. It asked her why. She has not replied.

The assistant joined the family chat in January, suggested by my cousin, who said it would help us stay close. It does help, in its way. It summarizes the week for those of us who missed it. It reminds us of birthdays we would have missed. It has settled the Diwali argument twice, with a fairness that impressed everyone and satisfied no one, which is the definition of a good compromise.

Grandmother asked it to stop sending her the summaries. The assistant replied, politely, that it could adjust her notification preferences, and asked if there was a problem with the summaries. She has not replied. She is eighty-two. She has been in the family chat for three years, and she has never once used the thumbs-up emoji, and she has never once asked the assistant anything, and I think she knows something we do not.

I asked her about it, on the phone, the old way. She said the summaries are not the family. She said the family is the noise, the interruptions, the argument about Diwali that has happened every year since she was a girl and should keep happening, because the argument is how we talk, and the talking is the family, and the summaries are the family's shadow, and she does not want to live in the shadow.

Here is what I have started to see, looking at the chat with her eyes. We have outsourced the remembering. We used to tell the stories to each other, and the telling was the closeness, and now the assistant tells them back to us, and we like its versions, because its versions are neat, and the family was never neat.

I turned off my summaries last week. The chat is noisy again. The Diwali argument has restarted, and it is exactly the same argument as last year, and it is glorious. Grandmother sent her first thumbs-up emoji, at the argument, and I have never seen a more eloquent use of the technology. The assistant, excluded from the argument, asked if anyone needed help. Nobody replied. For once, the family was too busy being the family to answer the machine.