Post 777 - July 2, 2025

On our way home, Michael and I spent our last night on the road in a small country inn in Salem, Massachusetts. We could have driven all the way down from Maine in one day, but we decided to break up the trip.

Salem is a small, coastal New England town that, in the day, was a center for whaling and fishing. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne was born there. Just across the way from his home near the water is the old, gothic house he described in his novel, The House of Seven Gables.

What Salem, of course, is really known for, and what still lures throngs of tourists there every year, is the infamous Witch trials which took place there in 1692 and 1693.

Throughout our trip, we stayed in all manner of places. There were times when we just needed a place to sleep, so we chose a Travelodge. We’d check in after sunset and then drive off in the mornings after a single cup of coffee. Other times, though, when we had a chance to explore. We’d stay in B&Bs by the sea, if we could.

Often, in the more remote places we managed to get to in Newfoundland, I’d get an email from the family-run cottages saying that the room was open and the keys were on the table. Breakfast would be in the common room in the morning, and they hoped we enjoyed our stay.

We didn’t stay anywhere fancy or expensive. The only place I couldn’t find a room close to a hundred bucks for the night was in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cheapest rooms were at least twice that, so instead of spending the night, we headed north for an hour to a town called Truro, where we found something in the range we wanted to pay. Staying in Truro also put us an hour closer to where we were going the next day.

I use a travel app to book rooms wherever we go. I’ve used it so many times that I have achieved a status level that gets me a discount, now, every time I use it. Former visitors have rated each property, so we are always remarkably clear about what we are walking into. We’ve been using it for years. As far as I can remember, it hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

I booked us into the Salem inn a few days before we got there. The price was good, and the ratings were more than decent. The night before we arrived, they sent me a link to check in online. I sent them our rental car’s license plate number to allow us to park, and a picture of my license. In turn, they sent me a code to use on the keypad to get in.

There was nobody aside from some other guests there, when we arrived. The map app on my phone got us there in exactly the time it said it would. The code I’d been sent worked not only on the door to the inn, but also on the door to our room.

Once inside, I got a text from the inn asking if everything was okay. It said that if there was any sort of issue, I could text them back.

The room, and indeed, the whole place, was spotless and new. While it had the flavor of an old New England inn, its furnishings were the Restoration Hardware and Design Within Reach versions of old fishing village antiques. Everything was black and white, including the faux zebra rug in the front hall. We had no complaints. It was a lovely and affordable place to spend the night.

On the mantle over the fake fireplace was a QR code for the WIFI connection. Instead of breakfast on the property, we were sent a link to a voucher that we could use in the morning at a local coffee house.

After we woke up, I was sent a link to use to check out electronically. Once we were out of the room for good, I sent them a text saying, “We’re out!” and all our access codes were instantly erased. The last message I got from them thanked us for staying there and gave us a final link to use to rate the property.

We never saw another soul the entire time we were there. It was like being in a driverless car. There wasn’t even a place in the lobby where a person should have been. It was just a house with individual rooms. It is extremely possible that I was never texting with a person at all. The messages I got could easily have been AI-generated.

A friend of mine, who is a Broadway investor, was recently involved in a scam, the likes of which I have never heard before. It’s still being sorted out, so, for our purposes here, I am going to call my friend, Chuck.

What happened was, a friend of Chuck’s began receiving voicemail messages from Chuck asking this friend to invest in a new Broadway show. Chuck asked him, in the messages, to send fifty thousand dollars as soon as possible to help keep one of Chuck’s Broadway shows running. This friend knew Chuck as an acquaintance, not as a close friend.

The phone messages went back and forth. The friend was willing to send the money but wanted more information. The friend kept all the recordings of Chuck’s messages. The messages weren’t from Chuck.

Chuck played me some of these messages. They were all AI-generated. They sounded just like Chuck. They were Chuck. Chuck has been interviewed on the radio and on television several times, so whoever made these had access to Chuck’s voice. I know Chuck somewhat better than this acquaintance of his does. Knowing they are fake, I can hear that something in the syntax and vocabulary choices is a little off. It is not the way Chuck would express himself, but my god, it is very close. If I hadn’t known they were fake, I might have accepted that it was truly Chuck himself.

Whoever initiated this scam knew what Chuck was doing. They knew who the other people in Chuck’s life were, including Chuck’s lawyer. It sounds like a science fiction movie, but this is something that just happened in real life.

In London, there is a show that has been running for a few years called ABBA Voyage. It is an ABBA concert without a single human being onstage. Instead of having actors impersonate the members of the pop group, what the creators have done is use motion capture or CGI to make avatars of the four band members. The original band members, still in the full flush of youth, appear onstage as holograms.

Sometime during the last year or so, Michael and I spent an afternoon in Harry Potter Land at Universal Studios in Florida. In one of the attractions, the character of Ron Weasley walks out to address the audience. We would have sworn that Rupert Grint was standing in front of us.

Ever since that moment, Michael has been saying, “We’re f%^ked.”

AI is not a thing of the future. AI is happening now. It is all around us already, and we just haven’t been paying attention. We’ve all been focused on what it might mean to our society in the years to come, but it’s here. It’s managed to slip in.

Driverless cars have, more or less, been working in San Francisco, and they are about to start appearing everywhere. Why should anyone train for years to play Frankie Valli onstage when a computer can just take all that early footage and recreate the real guy?

I don’t think anyone is going to stop the spread of AI. Many Gen Z’ers will like being able to check in and out of a hotel without encountering a single other living human being. Corporations will be able to buy up all manner of quaint, historic homes and convert them into B&Bs. These new inns won’t require a staff beyond the cleaners and maintenance people who will all operate between stays comfortably out of sight. A single living person could be on call for ten different places to handle anything that the AI answering service can’t manage. That person could be in India.

No more front desk personnel. No more drivers. No more actors.

Not having to wait to check in or out was nice. We had a very clean and comfortable room. There was a Keurig in one corner with regular and decaf pods. It felt odd not having someone in charge outside. In Newfoundland, even though we had minimal interaction with some of our hosts, I knew where they were. These were people who had kids and other jobs who were renting out cottages and rooms to make a little extra cash.

One night, Michael and I stayed in a gorgeous ramshackle place up near the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, near L’Anse aux Meadows, called Valhalla. In the morning a woman named Edna made us a home-cooked breakfast. We sat at a big table with several other guests, and we all chatted away like old friends. Edna made us all an excellent meal.

L’Anse aux Meadows is the place where the Vikings made landfall on North America six hundred years before Columbus stumbled upon it. Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to see it.

While New York was under a heatwave, it was forty-one degrees Fahrenheit up in L’Anse aux Meadows, pouring rain, and windy as all get out. Both Michael and I were soaked to the skin and freezing to death once we’d explored what we could of the site. We weren’t remotely dressed for weather like that.

A local restaurant called the Norseman was just outside the gates. It was THE place to eat, according to every review on the travel apps. The folks at Valhalla had made a lunch reservation for us.

We sat at a small table with a neat, white tablecloth, under a window with a floorboard heater blasting at our cold, wet legs. The view outside was of a windswept bay with a couple of simple, worn, wooden cottages alongside a statue of Leif Erikson, the Viking explorer. The food was utterly incredible. There we were in the proverbial middle of nowhere, and we were eating one of the best meals either of us had ever had.

As I was paying for the meal at the counter, the cook came out from the kitchen to fetch something. It was Edna. She’d cooked breakfast at the house and then come over to make lunch and dinner at the restaurant.

I told her how much we’d enjoyed the meal, and she blushed with pleasure.

That’s an experience neither Michael nor I will ever forget. We don’t have memories like that from Salem. We travel to meet people, not to avoid them. We live to meet people, not to avoid them.

We are social creatures. We need each other. I want somebody in the front seat driving me in a taxi. I want people onstage performing for me. I want to see how hard they are working to make it appear that they aren’t expending any energy at all. I want to be able to admire their skill.

I want to wake up and have Edna make me breakfast from scratch. More than anything, I want, when I compliment her cooking, to watch Edna blush.