The reviews are in, and the new Humane AI Pin makes Google Glass look like the greatest thing ever.
The device concept sounds like a sci-fi dream: It’s an AI in a brooch equipped with sensors so it can function as a buddy present in any given moment, connecting you to the universe of data on the web in real-time. It augments its ability to talk with a novel display tech that beams text onto your hand or any nearby surface.
Reviewers complain that it does none of that very well. It responds too slowly and its functions are executed imperfectly. It runs hot and the battery life is too brief. Some have said that wearing it could serve as a scarlet letter for tech fanaticism a la those clunky Google glasses from a decade ago.
Not one reviewer has mentioned the nightmare truth about the gizmo:
It’s the shape of things to come.
OK, so maybe the shape won’t be a brooch, but incorporating AI and its commensurate surveillance and active control into the everyday fabric of our lives is the ultimate wet dream for tech.
Waiting for people to activate their phones or click on web sites is too slow and the data collected and then regurgitated back to users too imperfect.
An AI buddy ill be the ultimate realization of the promise of making our lives more efficient, more predictable, and therefore more controllable. No decision will belong to us alone and everything we do will be captured, shared, and crunched to yield inputs to the next decision.
Like the invention of the smartphone, it’ll provide loads of benefits, too, so we’ll embrace our new AI best friends without question. We’ll learn to depend on them, which will blind us to the future iterations of services that we might otherwise question.
Less friend and more older, dominating sibling, and the AIs’ ultimate families won’t be ours but rather the business that sell and operate them. There’s nothing “humane” about this or any other AI.
It’s about tech and who profits from it.
Nobody is questioning the wisdom of this journey. They’re just complaining that the Humane AI pin is a disappointing early step along the way.
It won’t be the last, and that’s truly scary.
[This essay originally appeared at Spiritual Telegraph]