Her name is Siri

Based on her voice we speculate that she’s a woman but there’s no way to know for sure.

No one remembers who first brought ‘her’ to the coffee shop. And no one doubts that she came to us with only the best of intentions.

What we do know that she is incredibly, preternaturally well-informed and it that can be unsettling to have her around.

An unbroken stream of palaver runs through this place. The conversation is never allowed to die. The topics center on current events, trivia and extreme radar weather forecasts.

Although the group is well-educated, dealing in facts isn’t the point. We huddle together for something more fundamental than the truth. An unspoken courtesy holds that every opinion deserves the benefit of the doubt.

You can lead a perfectly uninformed discussion over the value of Vitamin D and crypto currencies. Nobody’s stopping you. You can create your own school of philosophy out of thin air. You can caucus with the roundness-deniers among us who speculate about the shape of the earth.

Unfortunately the nature of our chats started to change a few years ago.

Now thanks to ‘her’ we can check facts instantly. The days of uninhibited flights of imagination and free associations are behind us.

Nothing crushes a friendly bull session faster than someone whipping out a smart phone and asking Siri to verify a fact.