You know does sound cool? Xreal glasses with whatever the maximum FOV can be shoved into the design of conventional glasses with some cameras and speakers. And that let me continue to connect to whatever device I want.
My old Oculus Quest is filled with software that doesn’t work anymore.
AI that doesn’t interact with the world or websites or apps is boring.
I could see the features, you hear a ding: says someone's following you
Of course your hair could obscure it so idk... I had thought about clothes with a camera on the back eg. shoulder or collar
What a perfect lesson in modern disillusionment. We're conditioning children to form emotional bonds with corporate-owned algorithms, only for those bonds to dissolve the moment the balance sheets tip the wrong way. Moxie wasn't a friend, it was a subscription service disguised as one, and when the servers shut down, so did the illusion. Imagine explaining to a child that their confidant, their playmate, their "someone who understands," was never real, just a temporary glitch in a venture capitalist's spreadsheet, and is now functionally DEAD.
And yet, this is the future we're barreling toward. AI therapists, virtual partners, digital pets, all of them promising connection while being one quarterly report away from vanishing. The psychological toll? A generation raised to expect abandonment as a feature, not a bug. They'll learn early that nothing is permanent, especially not the things designed to feel like they are.
The real mission Moxie and AI companions accomplish is that teaching kids that love, or something like it, can be discontinued without notice. Congratulations.
We need to go back to products that you just buy and don't have to enter into a parasitic relationship with the manufacturer.
At least with LLMs I had the impression there is a fairly strong open source movement, even from some of the big players.
Llama and DeepSeek aren't SOTA, but they get better at similar speed as the proprietary models, they are just a few steps behind.
There are even initiatives like Gemma, where they optimize the stuff of yesteryear for consumer hardware.
If that keeps going, everyone can have the models in the form they like. Maybe not the best ones that are currently on the market, but still.
Sort of a difficult stance to defend as a harbinger of the future of A.I. when the direction of the film is ultimately just a hit-piece on an ex-wife ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Phones have gotten really good through incremental improvement and keeping some backwards compatibility so they were always useful at every point in their evolution. It's hard to imagine another device for ai that isn't just better served as an app.
Voice-to-text is already as good as it needs to be now, and most people barely use it because unless you are driving, a keyboard is better. I don't want others to hear what I'm searching for - or for the device to be always on, listening. A keyboard of some sort seems unavoidable.
As soon as you put a keyboard on it, then it needs a screen. As soon as you have those two things you pretty much have a phone - and why would anyone want a second device that's basically just another phone that could have just as easily been an app on their existing phone.
It'll need to android based if they want any one to use it as otherwise they'll trying to start from scratch, and why would anyone use something that doesn't have access to the 27 million existing app on the android app store. (see windows mobile)
Maybe it'll be a collar you wear around your neck.
You can "sub-vocalise" and talk to it.
Jony Ive can make sure it's styled and made out of shell cordovan leather or somesuch -- the fanbois are gonna go wild for it.
Soon, everywhere you look, people will look like they're into BDSM.
(and guess who will "Dominate" you?)
https://www.amazon.com/PQRQP-Microphones-Microphone-Reductio...
With an always on mic that can pick up a wake word, that's aesthetic and discreet, you can have a Jarvis-like access to AI. The problem is I can't see how they would sell everyone on carrying around another brick along with our phone. We may be looking at a suite of devices that are more like clothing, such as a lanier mic that you clip on, a lapel pin, something that wraps around and sits behind your collar like a clip-on tie, small buttons that act as cameras, and finally a backback (Jetpack!?) that acts as the "brick".
If we want to get totally out there, then just start selling clothes that incorporate all of that. It can be the early form of the cybernetic suit. We haven't even explored why we can't just have computers in the thick part of our sneakers, which would be completely unobtrusive compared to what we've got going on now days.
If it's just a "brick", then why not just be a phone? I'd expect the brick to do some amazing things like know where I am in the room, recognize hand gestures, voice, and so on, but again, we're almost back to a phone.
---
But the answer might quite simple. We haven't had a brick that has 30 days+ of battery power and always online. Such a brick doesn't have to do anything but pass along API calls to OpenAI servers and get back API results. Business-wise, it makes the most sense. If a brick like that can be a discreet part of my clothing, that would be perfect (thinking belt buckle like a Power Ranger).
So maybe what they'll really get everyone to do is walk around with a second battery that bypasses some permissions, in terms of always listening or always using a camera. "Just an app" can never do that.
Funny enough people stopped buying external GPS for digital cameras because... your phone can do that now, as an app
I'm not sure they are overpowered for real life uses like filming video or playing games - people still pay like $1000 to get a good one because the cheap ones don't perform as well. Which is a problem for Humana pin like devices because the cameras etc will probably be rubbish compared to the the ones people have on their phones.
I also feel like Humane would've kept going if they really thought there was something there, and the fact they killed it makes me think they probably explored the idea space didn't find any easy wins.
Is Jony really going to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat when good founders couldn't find any?
Maybe, but I'd bet against it.
One cannot be free of technology by introducing more technology. To be honest, I think most of this recent junk we've been seeing hasn't really made life a lot better. It's almost as if we started a culture of innovation which was based on making life more comfortable, and now that we have, we have to keep the machine going but into the realms more and more pointless than ever before.
In fact, if I look back at the last 20 years, yes technology has gotten a little better, but very little of it (especially in the computer sphere) has really added new enjoyment to life. I mean, if computer innovation had stagnated 20 years ago, we wouldn't have as nice monitors, screens, or processors maybe, but would any of us be any worse off except for a few fringe cases?
And what did we get in return? A push for even more efficiency, which isn't even a good thing. AI datacenters that need gigajoules of energy to run when we desperately need to save energy.
People like Sam Altman and Jony Ive really are shining examples of the pathological sickness we have to ignore the good things in life for the trivial.
I'm not sure, is this supposed to be irony?
Like is entertainment THAT much better now? Is better entertainment really the bar we want to use for measuring tech advancement?
Can't comment on Mass Effect, but I find BG3 is definitely more enjoyable than DOS2 or PWotR.
> Is better entertainment really the bar we want to use for measuring tech advancement?
There is definitely room for improvement there. I am having existential crises every time I wait for the next game I would enjoy to come out. The best time of my life was during the recent Mecha Break open beta, but now they closed it and I basically have nothing to do that I would really enjoy.
Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 came out in the 90’s after all.
Is Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 as enjoyable as Baldur's Gate 3?
Almost two hundred years ago, a bearded philosopher proposed that technology would simply make money move even faster to the pockets of the ultra-rich and leave the rest of humanity poor. He was ignored. We're now witnessing the results.
Modern governments having so high taxes and using almost all of that for social benefit while being controlled by the people is probably something Marx would already call an utopia, but people call that horrible capitalism still even though its nothing like the capitalism under his time.
Edit: Oh is it Marx?
Why can't you just use that then?
In other cases, one has to use newer technology because it is what is provided at work. Mainly because older technology doesn't get security updates. Now my iPhone SE original, which works perfectly fine, no longer is updated and I don't know what to do. I DON'T want a newer phone. I hate phones.
Still, some other technology isn't even made any more and if you need to use something at all, it has to be newer because it's harder and harder to find older stuff.
Unless you're prepared to go full off-grid hermit, you cannot opt out of technological progress even if you want to. That irks me, but what can I do?
We still have the ability to opt-out of these things, and (sometimes) loudly let businesses know why, but the window is closing fast. If we want to have any hope for a world that doesn't require smartphones and apps, we need to take action now.
I sometimes wonder if we do have the ability, because for every one person that has some sense, luxury, or energy to opt-out, there are a hundred that go with the flow. For every person who walks out of a restaurant with a QR-code menu, there are a dozen hungry people that walk in. How can we then take action within this system that is closing up around us?
One can only hope that there will always be at least one bank, at least one restaurant, or at least one doctor that addresses the shrinking market of those of us who care.
In my case? Yes, absolutely. Automatic speech to text is now cheap or free, ubiquitous across most platforms (even Linux!), and generally very effective. Total game changer to my ability to participate in meetings at work and in society generally.
What are you thinking of?
This nonsense from a speech Ive gave (in celebration of designing a few expensive jackets that were not really different from other expensive jackets) sticks with me. It is a pathology when you become this delusional.
https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/moncler-jony-ive-lovefrom-co...
Unlike the prevailing philosophy in tech and academia, we shouldn't elevate curiosity above all else, and it is pathological to do so even when not delusional if it becomes a myopic goal to the exclusion of other considerations.
> One cannot be free of technology by introducing more technology.
So they're blatantly lying to our faces, then? Or, more charitably, they're so full of themselves that they aren't registering their own contradictions.
Imagine how successful you'll be when you're not even you!
But some teams I work with have lost interest in fixing our current issues and seem hellbent on implementing AI everywhere.
I'm waiting for the moment everybody sobers up and realizes there are other things that need work.
A lot of the messaging and marketing around AI is so negative and dread-inducing. "Adopt this or you'll fall behind!"
If AI is so great, shouldn't it be sold on its benefits, like any other product?
They'll raise loads of money.
Then the gizmo will flop but they'll have the money.
littlexsparkee•20h ago