Humane seemed to anticipate that the first reviews of its AI Pin would be brutal.
In an interview with Inverse and a statement to The Verge, Humane’s cofounders positioned the AI Pin not as a finished product, but as the start of an “ambient computing” era. The idea is that technology will recede into the background, and our smartphones will be supplanted by all-knowing virtual assistants that are just a voice command or gesture away.
It’s a tantalizing vision for anyone who’s watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but we already know it’s impractical. Bigger companies such as Google and Amazon spent years trying to deliver ambient computing, and they’ve failed for reasons that have nothing to do with AI shortcomings or hardware limitations. The whole concept is simply at odds with how the tech industry works, and it’ll forever be held back by a lack of cooperation and limited profit potential.
We’ve been here before
Combined, Amazon and Google have shipped tens of millions of smart speakers, and they’ve loaded their respective Alexa and Google Assistant on myriad other devices, including TVs, streaming boxes, smart displays, and even thermostats. Both companies have also used the terms “ambient computing” or “ambient intelligence” to describe how their assistants will usher in a kind of post-phone era.
“The technology just fades into the background when you don’t need it. So the devices aren’t the center of the system, you are. That’s our vision for ambient computing,” Rich Osterloh, Google’s head of devices and services, said at the company’s I/O conference in 2019.
But while ambient computing hardware is now pervasive, the lofty goal of intelligent assistance hasn’t materialized. That’s largely because getting these assistants to interact with the surrounding world is a thankless slog that requires not just better AI, but links to an impossibly broad array of warring ecosystems.
For example, let’s say you want to play something on the TV with a voice command. Both Alexa and Google Assistant support this in theory, but only with a precise combination of hardware and software. You need a speaker with the right voice assistant, plus a TV that’s compatible with commands from that assistant. Even then, it might not work because the streaming service you want to watch doesn’t work with the voice assistant you selected.
