Artificial intelligence will kill the smartphone, and perhaps the entire screen

You wake up. You don’t check your phone. Alternatively, you can activate various wearable devices embedded in your body and have a series of conversations with inanimate objects. You create Minority report– Style gestures in the air. You blink a lot. Things get started, tasks get done, and the day begins. It turns out that you don’t need a smartphone at all.

A lot of people are making big predictions about artificial intelligence. Critical thinking is this, the end of the world, and aren’t you worried about jobs, jobs, jobs? For our part, we are confused. It’s not because we don’t believe doomsday scenarios are coming. We just think they’re missing the clearest, clearest way in which AI will reshape society. Right now, we live and die in the harsh, unforgiving glare of screens. They are everywhere. In the age of artificial intelligence, they will not be, fortunately.

In other words, AI won’t just kill the phone. If done correctly, it will free us from the tyranny of the screen completely.

Why aren’t more people talking about this? Sam Altman, at least, kind of is. When pressed at a recent dinner about OpenAI’s new partnership with Apple designer Jony Ive, he said: “You don’t get a new computing paradigm very often.” This is true, and probably the reason why more people don’t risk it. New technology always seems impossible, until it becomes inevitable. A smartphone was once impossible. Pocket-sized computer? With applications and network connections? Those poor people at General Magic had the idea and prototype roughly 13 years before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. The technology was not ready. It was not common people.

This means: We may be another 15 years away from the great elimination of screening. But it will happen, and you may have noticed that the process has already begun. We’re texting less with our AI, and actually talking Hadiththem more. The side button on our iPhones? Sorry, stupid Siri, it now plays the ChatGPT sound instead. Soon, we’ll be recording with AI agents, installing AI speakers in our homes, and attaching AI recording devices to our jackets. Eventually, as we and they interact with the world, we will begin to ask, then demand: Why aren’t advanced AI interfaces everywhere, in everything, in our cars and smart devices, in drive-thru lanes and information kiosks? They’re called chatbots for a reason: voice is their killer app.

But it takes an actual product, as it always does, to undo what came before. So look first at OpenAI, because it’s their game to lose. Last year, Altman poached a group of wearables and manufacturing workers at Apple and put Ive in charge of them to create top-secret designs. No one can say for sure what they are working on, but please. We know. They know. These guys are obsessed with the movie HaWhere Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Like a modern-day Ursula, Altman allegedly tried to steal ScarJo’s valuable voice for ChatGPT. If it wants to take over the world and its oceans of AI data, OpenAI needs hardware, so, yes, damn it ScarJo, you can be sure his staff is busy prototyping an anti-smartphone device as we speak, a kind of always-on companion with a harsher fembot voice.

Is it as in HaAn inconspicuous device inside the ear? According to documents filed as part of an ongoing trademark dispute, no. Obviously, it may not even be wearable. This frankly shocks us. With AirPods, its latest great hardware innovation, Apple has trained entire generations to stuff their ears with tiny earbuds, which means the pieces are in place for the enhanced form factor of next-generation AI. And don’t set IV to start from scratch. It’s redesigned, not radical.

Or is it the idea that we still, somehow, need screens? And Apple seems to think so: It, like Microsoft, Samsung and many other companies, is developing its “smart home” offerings and adding displays to the left and right. Meanwhile, Meta is investing, or reinvesting, in smart glasses. (We don’t care how “good” they are – glasses will never be universal.) Even new devices like the Rabbit r1, which are voice-based and don’t trigger apps and gestures, are “moving away from the traditional screen-based model,” as one AI executive put it. He still has the screen. Old habits etc

The truth is, screens suck, and they always have. In a world so divided, most people — including 74% of teens, according to Pew — seem to agree. Screens are clumsy, a necessary evil, and an intermediate step. Some of them may stick, but they won’t last forever, for the simple reason that they slow down our interactions with critical machines.

So imagine a world beyond the screen. No smudges, no cracks. No texting thumbs, no neck pain. The video and image will not shrink, they will explode. After being released from its vertical shaft, it will be radiated into our eyes and projected onto surfaces. Everything will change, every map, every interior. If you thought the audio tours were weak, just wait. The world will become a museum, and we, its humble patrons, wander around in amazement, pointing this, staring at that, liberated from the screen, talking, talking, all the time. Talk! To machines, to everything, to nothing, to ourselves.