I Can’t Wait to be Disappointed by The Humane AI Pin
I’m one of the people who preordered the AI Pin from Humane.
If you don’t know about this device yet, I’ll tell you all about it: what its creators claim it is, what I expect it to be, and what others are saying about it before it’s even released (very little of which is positive).
Humane’s AI Pin According to Humane
The AI Pin is, for starters, a wearable phone; it makes & receives calls and text messages, with outgoing messages crafted by AI and edited by you. It also has a user interface projected onto the palm of your hand.
The AI Pin is constantly learning about which contacts you trust and screening those you don’t. You can ask it spoken questions and get answers based on whatever information about your life you’re looking for, whether simple or complex. You can ask for the prices of things you’re holding based on your favorite sites, and then buy them. It’s an automatic spoken language translator. You can get nutrition and health information about foods you’re holding, customized to your personal health plan. It’s a still image & video camera. It’s a music player with Bluetooth headphones support. It’s a hardware device and operating system designed from the ground up to host a personal Artificial Intelligence with a deep understanding of the world and the wearer.
Many of these things are things we do for ourselves today with our phones. So such claims form an implicit promise, that the AI Pin will be a sort of personal assistant, using your phone for you in a sense. It will do your shopping, emailing, texting, scheduling, meal planning, and information retrieval, like a little Alexa on your lapel. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the Pin’s marketing to call it a phone replacement. And there’s the rub.
Will I be able to write an article like this with the AI Pin? Maybe. I’ll give it a try and report back. Maybe it will have a way to save files, or dictate into a Google Doc.
Or maybe I will be able to “write” by giving the AI directions like “Write an article on all the things I’ve told you to remember regarding my feelings about the AI Pin,” and then edit what it generates (an utter failure of a replacement, to be clear).
I strongly doubt that any amount of writing or reading—those truly essential and fundamental human acts which screens enable today—will be possible with the Pin on day one.
But I do write with my phone. I also use my phone for scanning QR codes at restaurants, ordering delivery, opening the doors at my apartment, playing Wordle with my mom and niece every morning, looking at photographs, watching videos, getting driving directions…
Humane’s founders say that the era of smartphones has plateaued, and that the AI Pin is our peek into the screenless future that awaits us. Will AI Pin do all of that? Any of that on day one?
The AI Pin is in no way a replacement for our phones. And god forbid an auditory-only experience ever replace reading and writing.
So, wherever you find coverage of the AI Pin, whether in the coverage itself or down in the comments, you find it being roasted.
Humane’s AI Pin According to Almost Everyone Else
“Another product for….no one.”
“[Y]ou can hold up some food, ask about the nutrition facts, and then awkwardly announce to everyone in earshot, ‘OK, I’m going to eat it.’”
“The humane thing to do with this e-waste is to put an end to it.”
Every aspect of the Pin’s unreleased user experience waits behind the curtain being booed preemptively by the audience.
The appless, screenless experience is almost universally predicted to suck. The monochrome hand projector and hand UI, the little “beacon” notification light, the voice/speakerphone interfaces. Many articles by authors who have seen the AI Pin in action talk about it being slow.
“I see users of this thing being brutally ashamed in the streets as this device tries to accomplish something.”
“This is a project headed to the curiosity cabinet where someone will no doubt remark it was ahead of its time,”
“Their target audience are the wealthy idiots who pre-order any new tech (worthwhile or worthless)…”
The same questions echo wherever the Pin is discussed, questions which the product’s marketing seems to accidentally raise without answering.
“Why isn’t this just a phone accessory?”
“Why not just get an Apple Watch with cellular?”
“Who needs this?”
The Expectations of a Cynic
What follows is fiction. I don’t know if this story is at all similar to the Humane story, but I’m afraid the two might rhyme.
Talented designer and manager, both influential at Apple from the iPhone to Apple Watch, leave to do their own thing. Their big idea: the future of personal computing is a wearable phone, a touchpad-pin that projects its UI onto your palm, is a camera, and a Siri-like virtual assistant. Years of R&D later, they have a janky little wearable bodycam phone. The projector tech is light years behind what it needs to be, leagues of backward steps from Retina to monochrome, and the Siri-thing is just the basic voice commands: take a picture, make a reminder, call a contact. Without an interface revolution, the screenless future looks bleak. Then ChatGPT drops. Investors Bill Gates and Sam Altman enable a partnership with OpenAI and now the wearable can send the commands it doesn’t already handle to a custom ChatGPT. In the growing hype around LLMs, a marketing message is found: this wearable phone is actually an AI agent, and its limited functionalities a boon to screen-addicted users everywhere.
I only weave this tale to say that I am expecting the AI Pin to be the product resulting from such a story. I don’t love that product, and I don’t like the way this story ends.
But as the start of a story it’s got some real promise.
I expect on day one to have to do a few hours of tedious work, manually adding contacts, calendar events, health goals, and favorite sites to use for shopping commands. I predict that I will play with the AI Pin’s health and translation features for a little while and be disappointed by both, that I will share my new phone number with trusted contacts and they’ll still call and text my phone, or both devices, and that eventually the Pin will be a ChatGPT on my chest that I’m a little embarrassed to wear.
If that is the Pin’s fate, I wonder how long it will take to get there.
I wonder too if I could possibly cope hard enough with articles like this one to make the thing actually surprise and delight me as it sails over the sea-level bar I set for it pre-release.
But mostly, I wonder what the future will unlock for this product, its potential to create a new device market, and its team.
The Hopes of a Dreamer
The people at Humane are all-in. It’s pretty obvious. They have devoted themselves for years to their product, and that product is nothing like anything that has come before it, simultaneously:
- a unique piece of attractive wearable technology
- a first of its kind AI-centric operating system & suite of personal assistant software
- a palm-tracking laser display interface with an innovative hand gesture-based UI
The AI Pin is quite literally unlike anything that came before it. It’s so many big-dream gambles and high-minded visionary ideas stuffed into one package, I can’t help but just love the audacity of it all.
When Humane says their mission is to build innovative technology that “is born from good intentions,” I believe them. What they’re doing is a wild gamble, but as far as bets go, its a fun one.
If the regular over-the-air updates I’ll be paying $24 a month for end up improving the Pin at the speed of AI, I can imagine it slowly taking over more aspects of my life that today I micromanage with my phone. The OS and experiences could get better and better and within a year the first gen AI Pin could be functioning as a real AI agent. Software & firmware updates could feasibly have the Pin doing all that scanning of QR codes, ordering takeout, making menu suggestions based on my tastes, opening the doors at my apartment, and giving me driving directions.
But there are two key components missing from the Pin’s palm-projected monochrome display that are only solved with hardware: depth and color. With a color version of their laser ink projector and an infrared projector like the one used by the iPhone’s Face ID, the final image could be projected accounting for the dynamic contours of the palm and accomplish a lot of very pleasing effects, like staying flat on the hand as it moves and angles away from the device, or a UI that appears to hover and cast a shadow on the palm, not to mention merely being a color image. Assuming the state of the art in miniature color projecting and the power it requires are available for the Pin’s tiny package, this seems feasible to me. (Aside: I wonder if the AI Pin’s real design genius is in those compact next-to-the-skin battery modules.)
In fact I believe this is all possible, I believe that the Pin could eventually live up to its promises, and I believe that Humane is a team of talented people thoroughly committed to what they’re building. This product’s future is entirely in their hands. Its immediate success will depend upon software engineers’ ability to deliver a steadily improving user experience. Its long-term success will depend upon the engineers who build that second gen hardware.
We shall see. Well, I will anyway. From the looks of things, not many people will join me. The Pin’s final chapter will likely land somewhere between my dreams and my expectations. Whatever the ultimate result, my dice are thrown. I can’t wait to get it, even if it means almost certainly being disappointed in the initial experience before I strap in and watch this gamble’s slow evolution play out. Stay tuned.
