comments on a pin

I was asked for to comment on the Humane Ai Pin (omitting punctuation), so a quick minipost.   I have no experience with this device, but have a bit of experience in the area so a bit of background is in order.  

 

For the decade from 1992 to 2002 I spent a good deal of time working on a variety of Internet access schemes as well as spending a lot of time with a human computer interaction group. People in carpetland were interested so we did a number of dog and pony shows as well as wizard-of-oz demos.¹   I'm not good at predicting the future - no one is - but I believe you can construct plausible scenarios and get a sense of some of the possibility space.  You end up remembering the few home runs.  In 93 or 94 I said you'd be able to have a conversation in full color with a relative on the other side of the globe and wouldn't have to pay long distance fee.  Both of you would use a piece of glass with embedded electronics and radio that you'd hold in your hand. Technically it was certainly possible - the main technical rub was the battery.  I hadn't appreciated advances in lithium-ion chemistry at the time.  The other two roadblocks were monopoly carriers and about a half trillion in infrastructure.  I didn't see either of those as being insurmountable - a feeling that was shared by several colleges.  Ten or years may seem like a long time for device predictions, but the foundational technologies are usually on even longer horizons.. it's mostly seeing how they might converge.  The who and how are more difficult. 

 

As the decade went on we began to focus on music over the Internet. We even showed a prototypes to player Steve Jobs at Apple in an attempt to gain support for our music codec (AAC) a few years before the iPod.  Our design wasn't that clever, but the recognition that portable music was important resonated for a few years.   We were also working on other communication concepts - some were just concepts ten or twenty years out.  There was the iCane - sort of a smartphone in the form of a cane, something like Google's eyeglasses, an infrastructure called AirGraffiti that, while basically a good idea, required a billion dollars or so a year to make fly (Google and Apple Maps are sophisticated examples), and so on.. We even looked at brooches and Star Trek communicators.

 

Smartwatches seemed so obvious we didn't spend much time other than being able to generate prompts by snapping or rubbing your fingers together (coming later this year on Apple's watch).  The watch is a wonderful piece of jewelry that can be as inconspicuous as you need it while still signaling personal style - one of the few pieces of jewelry men wear. 

Like a few other research groups, we wondered about other forms. Perhaps something on the belt would come earlier as putting the electronics in a phone seemed ten years off at least and five more for a watch.  Taking with sociologists and anthropologists it was clear that people love images and video.  The phone seemed like a wonderful platform IF you could pull it off.  My piece of glass on steriods, but now only ten years off.  We were beginning to see it as a computational platform rather than simply a videophone.  

 

There were video projectors that could work on slanted and even arbitrary surfaces.. they were really crappy for a number of reasons. They don't and won't compete with a smartphone screen for a long time. Also remember your smartphone weighs about 200 to 300 grams plus or minus.  Try hanging that on your clothes somewhere with properly positioned so you can put a surface in front of it. Also add some weight to run the projector for any length of time. 

 

There's the notion of 'voice first".  Folks who study human communication note that what we think of as voice is only a small part of spoken conversation.  In addition to expressions and postures there are several types of context:  the context of who, of place, of history, etc..  Voice alone is a relatively small, albeit important, part of spoken communication. To get it close right you probably have to give up a lot of privacy,   

 

I claim video is so addictive to so many that the smartphone in their pocket will rule for some time.  Earbuds, if you need audio, will talk to the phone in your pocket or your watch, which is in a position to take more meaningful biodata than something on your shirt.  I asked an animator friend (she was a student at our place twenty years ago and she regularly looks at designs from her sister who is a high end jewelry designer) to make some sketches of a wearable for clothing that would be about half the volume of an iPhone.  She made a few sketches  and said it would be very dorky.. probably like something from the Victorian era.²

 

These are things you wear..  they say something about you and your person style.  They offer only serious constraints. 

 

There are more technical reasons I can give, but I'm guessing the Ai Pin will fade rather quickly in most social groups.  But then again this is not my area and I'm frequently wrong.   Also in 1993, when Kip told me they were going to get a gravity wave detector working in twenty years, I believed him.  The technology is probably the most advanced on the planet plus they didn't have to deal with really hard problems like style and fashion.  Maybe in ten years, but I'm not one to bet against quality video.  

__________

¹ The label we gave to the C-level floor as the carpet was nearly thick enough to impede walking.

² Applying similar reasoning one of the anthropologists in the department pronounced the hugely promoted Segway a social faux pas as it implied 'totalitarian dorkishness'.