Your AI Shopping List At CES?

Many of the 4,500 exhibitors at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show will talk about AI, according to the annual event’s organizer.

Only there won’t be any AI gizmos on display, since AI isn’t some “thing” we consumers can or will buy. AI isn’t a product, per se. It’s an enabler, an ingredient, a component of electronic devices, albeit a potentially immense one.

So, the show will be all about putting AI into the devices consumers use and why that’ll be a good thing.

We won’t have a choice about it.

From products to ideas

Trade shows used to be the best and perhaps only way for manufacturers to sell their stuff to distributors and retailers. Sure, there was always an element of “what if” presented to jazz up exhibits (think concept cars at auto shows), but success was measured in the number and value of written purchase orders.

The Internet killed most of those events, even though displaying products online and purchasing them at the push of a button obviated the need for boozy dinners on a company’s dime.

CES survived because it provided a last stand for all that happy schmoozing, but more so because it shifted its focus from facilitating sales of today’s gizmos to promoting fantasies of what tomorrow’s offering might look like.

It’s one big PR stunt intended to nudge media, financial analysts, and influencers of all shapes and sizes to embrace a shared expectation for the future. It’s also where companies scare and dare one another to commit to those outcomes.

CES aims to present a view of the world that rises to the level of self-fulfilling prophecy. Rest assured that the media coverage of it this week will glowing reflect that certainty and its subtle impacts will be felt in the how AI is talked about until, well, next year’s event.

Or so that’s the game plan.

The problem with predicting the future

If past visions of our tech future were any good, we’d be buzzing around on our personal jetpacks and have family and friends living in orbit and on the Moon.

Not only are most predictions imperfectly realized, if at all, but they usually miss all the ugly side-effects that’ll come with them. Just imagine if the little cars buzzing on wide-open freeways in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair had been bathed in exhaust haze.

I was a frequent CES attendee over the past 25 years, and they got the future prediction thing consistently wrong. I’m reminded of years of promises that homes would be “smart” and, more recently, that cars would drive themselves.

From the promotion of somewhat reasonable sharper and ever-larger TV screens to the silly can opener/fly-fishing gizmos, my overriding takeaway was to wonder who asked for this crap?

On the topic of their latest infatuation with AI, the answer remains nobody…except the companies and investors who hope to make a killing on it, just like every other prediction they’ve tried to make come true. Partial and/or delayed success is still a win.

There’s no demand for this stuff, only supply looking for an outlet.

Their AI shopping list

I’m relieved not to be at this year’s show (the past few have been memorable mostly as COVID super-spreader events), but I can imagine the aisles will be filled with endless iterations of AI making so-and-so product better/faster/cheaper and thereby providing consumers with ease, efficiency, and/or “value” (a consultingese bugaboo term that has no meaning whatsoever).

Nvidia’s founder and CEO will keynote the festivities. You can just imagine where it’ll go from there.

And it won’t matter if their rosy predictions are inaccurate, incomplete, or don’t get realized at a speed and scope that matches their aspirations.

CES is a statement of purpose:

Manufacturers, their suppliers and consultants, a global distribution system and an entire ecosystem of investors and shareholders are challenging each other to make this AI future happen.

It’s not our shopping list…it’s theirs.

Watch that Futurama film again and ask yourself a question that should be top of mind for us this week:

Where are the people?

[This essay appeared originally at Spiritual Telegraph]