The new “iPhone killer” – a nightmare for 99 percent of Swedes

Are you ready to talk to the fruits in the store?

Imagine a world without mobile phones. No screens, just real people and nature. Just like in the good old days.

It may sound like a utopia, but now it is possible. That’s what the creators behind a new AI gadget that has been painted as the new “iPhone killer” claim.

Until we got to see the painful launch.

The hype surrounding the new AI company Humane has been going on for months after co-founder Imran Chaudhri showed off his new innovation during a featured TED Talk. The gadget that will revolutionize our lives and make you a cyborg is called Humane Ai Pin. A voice-controlled box that you wear on your chest and that is powered by artificial intelligence.

Since it has a camera, projector and speakers, it can help you with most things. Yes, it can answer phone calls, send messages and have your emails read aloud. But that is only the beginning. Your new bestie is always on, always online and comes in thousands of guises. As an interpreter, she helps you order beer in Chinese and as a chef’s assistant, she helps you cook without having to put down your mobile phone. Thanks to the camera, the interpreter can translate parking signs you don’t understand, while the shopping assistant helps you compare prices online when you suspect your local shopkeeper is trying to rip you off. And as your personal assistant, she can remind you of the names of people you meet. All you have to do is point the camera at the objects and tell them what you want to know, and you’ll get the answer in your ear. Or in the hand.

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Your bestie is bragging even with a projector that can project things. For example, the calculations for the child’s math homework. And since Humane Ai Pin is powered by artificial intelligence, he can also act as a personal sommelier by helping you choose wine for a dish if you don’t trust the human waiter. Or why not let him summarize your talkative colleague’s long explanations so that you can do other things during the Zoom meeting?

The goal of the Humane Ai Pin is to make the technology invisible. Therefore, it has been painted as a potential “iPhone killer” by both the media and excited tech influencers in the constant search for The Next Big Thing. And not against me. I hope they are right. Man’s relationship with the smart phone has derailed. It is now our remote control for life. The latest figures show that we Swedes use mobile phones for over three hours a day. That’s 20 percent of our waking time! That is sick. Especially considering that the smart phone will only be a parenthesis when historians of the future sum up humanity’s time on earth in a thousand years.

Man survived without digital remote control for 300,000 years. Then Steve Jobs invented the smart phone and now we spend a fifth of our waking hours staring at it. So it’s no wonder the mood was electric when Humane Ai Pin was unveiled during a live broadcast last week after a few months of foreplay. But when the broadcast was over, so was the hype. The cracks in the facade were obvious. The demonstration contained several mistakes and was so stiff that the broadcast resembled more of a hostage video than a revolutionary world premiere.

Sure, some think still that this technology can fundamentally change our lives. But exactly how is still unclear. Humane Ai Pin is like a Swiss army knife. It can do a lot, but what is its primary function? And are we really ready to interact with dead things among other people? This technology would be a nightmare for 99 percent of Swedes. As the magazine Insider writes: “The technology is impressive, even mind-blowing. The only downside is that you look like an absolute weirdo, talking to a fruit in the middle of the grocery store.”

Another bump in the road is the price. Since it costs SEK 7,500, it is required that it fully replace the smart phone. In addition, the subscription costs SEK 250 per month in the USA, where the product is released first. But most of all, the design is so ugly that there are only two potential buyers for this suspicious AI castle in the air: early-early-early adopters and the person who really hates their phone. Therefore, I unfortunately have to state that the hunt for The Next Big Thing continues. Most things point to the fact that we will continue to stare down at our mobile phones for a few more years.