Drum roll please….
Humane, a well funded startup exiled in their own product laboratory since 2018 made headlines last week with the launch of an Ai pin. Here’s an article with a more conventional review and pictures if you’re curious: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/technology/silicon-valleys-big-bold-sci-fi-bet-on-the-device-that-comes-after-the-smartphone.html.
This review is a little different. I don’t care much about the company’s history. And I’m not impressed by where people have worked before. There is a weird badge of honor people wear or a general cache that seems to come from working at one of the big tech firms. I don’t understand why. I also don’t care about what prominent investors are fueling their development. They can be just as wrong as you and I. They have no special insight. Though they can afford to be wrong a lot. I’m only interested in the product itself – what it says about what Humane thinks of us, where prominent tech savants think the world is going, and how hundreds of millions of dollars can be squandered on solutions to very small problems.
The first thing I was struck by is the appearance of the device. If form is supposed to follow function then what Humane have built is a police body camera in a sleek shell. It’s a surveillance device you can wear prominently to document all of the mundane life moments and upload them to cloud storage for future reference. But that’s an odd concept no? People only care about the select moments of their lives they choose to capture today by taking out a device and purposely documenting it for posterity. We curate as we live. If most of the footage this glorified body camera can capture is boring, cutting room floor material, then what purpose can it possibly serve as a tool that purports to be an advanced AI assistant? I’ll let you make that short logical leap. We already live in a world where closed circuit surveillance is everywhere. We already carry around devices that know more about us than we know about ourselves. The only thing missing in our tech obsessed lives is a clear, eye level camera mounted on every human for more clear pictures of everyday faces, places, emotions, and the dull life moments that pass without notice and make us, well, human.
Which, come to think of it, I don’t think they could have chosen a more Orwellian name for the company behind this product than Humane. Somehow they’ve determined that the solution to too many screens is more surveillance? It’s a one plus one equals three situation. I’ll give you another odd calculation. The Humane solution for atomized world built on screen interfaces is a robot whispering in my ear? And it’s not only whispering in my ear, it’s answering all my questions as if it was an authority and every life question had a ready-made answer instead of presenting an opportunity for a human to do actual research and reading to arrive at an answer that could enlighten their view of the world that a machine cannot possibly understand, no matter how sophisticated its ability to predict the right order of words and deliver them to a person in fractions of a second. This is exactly the thing I need to be more present in my real life? The antidote to screens is a gadget that pulls me into a conversation with, myself? Really? How does making me more self-centered help anything? We already have social media for that. Humane is newspeak for cruel. It’s almost a joke of a name. It’s the kind of thing I would expect to see in a glib sci-fi movie where everything is a little too on the nose.
It kind of reminds of Her, the Spike Jonze movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. I didn’t think that was a bad film, certainly not the made for late night TV pseudo-intellectual schlock that would have Humane as the narrative heart of good intentions gone awry. I didn’t watch Her and think how great it would be to live in a world where people can be all-consumed by their relationships with AI. It felt cold and sterile and sad, but ultimately tilts towards a happy, less tech reliant ending. If Humane was the center of a movie concept it would be built on similar technology and a completely different story. It would be about a bunch of cloistered techno-absolutists patting themselves on the back for selling widgets nobody needs and blaming everyone else when they lose control of the thing they’ve created. I imagine the leaders of the company sitting in a palatial, austere home, just kind of saying oh well and moving on to some other minor concern while chaos reigns around them. I see it as a tale of two cities, told with rudimentary character depth, low budget special effects, and pretty faced actors with limited talent, emoting terrible, focus group tested lines. The movie would be a slightly enhanced (AI enhanced possibly) version of the Ai pin itself; A testament to how reductive big idea thinking can be. Except the movie I’m suggesting is what the founders actually intend. Is it entertainment conquering reality or vice versa? I’m not sure.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe people want their body cam to project onto their hand so they can make commands in a weird pantomime. Maybe we all want to be mimes, stuck in our very own invisible boxes. At least there are a world of apps and sites out there that are integrated or usable with the Ai pin. The whole losing control of the device scenario isn’t possible, right? Wait, Humane’s operating system comes with the pin. It forces you to use a whole suite of tools they’ve built for you. That is a feature of this novel tool, not a bug, mind you. I’m sure nothing can go wrong with that. We don’t have any examples today where tech firms exercise immense power. Putting all my data eggs in one creepy basket shouldn’t be a problem.
We have two large wars going on in the world, people are dying needlessly, climate change has turned Philadelphia into North Carolina, and the big thinkers who want to reorient our relationship with tech want to sell me a lapel mounted camera that treats me like its best friend. Maybe the general consumer isn’t who needs a friend. But hey go out and get yourself a body cam this holiday season.
