A comic of my life, made with the Looki AI pendant.
It’s been a while, but I’m back with another Intertwixt. It’s been an odd time, and lots of weekends I’ve been working or traveling. Or I didn’t have a story to tell you. But that’s changed now. I’m back from Google I/O where I looked at lots of smart glasses, getting ready for Apple’s WWDC and AWE (an augmented reality show in Long Beach, California where I’ll be speaking), and my head’s spinning with thoughts. About, what else? AI. AI, AI, AI, AI, AI.
I’ve never liked AI much. Or, I pretended it never existed. When generative AI came onto the scene years ago, my friends would tell me about its weird writing skills and encourage me to try it. I felt like I didn’t care much.
I’m being made to care now, because AI is everywhere, relentlessly, expensively, in every app and across so many competing services, pushing towards devices that will serve it up in our eyes and ears.
AI is, for sure, a needed piece in a larger puzzle of computing. Probably, it’s a fusion point for attaching us to a diffuse expansion of hardware types, worn upon us, using multitudes of sensors, stretching across multiple screens real and virtual. What I’ve thought of as VR and AR, and now is being called XR…that landscape, it’s being terraformed all over again via AI. But it’s all a battlezone now, with us in the middle.
I’ve been wearing little AI things around with me lately. To test them. A pendant, with a camera, called Looki. My family hates it. Most people I meet feel ambivalent at best about it. I feel embarrassed wearing it. But I want to see what it sees, what it summarizes, what really can be done, what can’t, what’s broken, what’s concerning. Looki nudges me with observations. It delivers summary comic book panels of my days walking around with it. It makes supercut videos of moments it’s dangling from my neck.
But it invades. And where does that line get drawn? I am now a walking surveillance experiment. And everyone I meet is part of it. And maybe, become new comic book panels in my half-remembered AI memory melt.
I’ve also been wearing Google’s Fitbit Air, and using the Gemini-powered Google Health that replaces the old Fitbit app. I wear it on my right wrist, Apple Watch on left, and I compare how they measure. I’ve been reading Google’s text summaries of my night’s sleep, my activity levels and energy as I stayed up late at Google I/O and went to my Princeton University reunion staying up way late and walking in the rain.
Google’s AI is sometimes good, sometimes bad, the curate’s egg that’s most generative AI. And it pings me with its own suggestions, different than Looki’s.
And then I’m also wearing Meta’s Ray-Bans. I just started trying out a prescription pair of the new Scriber Optics, and testing the Muse Spark AI model on them, which is faster. But as well as they’re designed as hardware, and as fast as they are to respond to me, they’re still like a weird conversational voice connected to nearly nothing else in my life, trying to be…my companion? And serve me up other observations, while the Fitbit and Looki try for others?
These are like three wearable ghosts upon me. AI growing on me like lichen.
I know that AI is the present panic. The Eater of Resources. The source of the bubble. A threat so everpresent that the Pope wrote an encyclical on it. It’s growing in power, hard to predict, way overhyped, and way too consuming of financial and energy-based resources. It’s a force that’s carrying over into every future product, and enters into every chat about tech now. I try to read about as much as I try to escape it. I think about transcending it and diving into it and also shattering it. It’s the theme, the spirit, in the plays I’m writing now. And it’s likely to be the miasma that surrounds me as I grow older, acting as my memory, seeing things for me, being my helper.
I think about myself doubling via AI…digital twinning…splitting from myself. Consulting with clouds of AI that have fed on my data in pools, pieces of me grown in different vats.
To fight for better control of AI is essential. To use it responsibly is key. We need to know what the AI-generated deepfakes are, to let us know what’s real and what’s manipulated. Watermarks. Citations. But also we need to hold onto our sense of self. Somewhere in the middle of this mess is us, and what we define ourselves to be. I am already extended into my tech, a self that lives in part through my digital pieces. Many of us are. I need to find a center. Find me. No matter what the AI shapes into.
I was in the heart of Google I/O and felt the overwhelming focus on AI, but I also want to let the pieces that don’t interest me flow off, discard. Take only what I find interesting. That’s how I manage myself. If the world only takes the bits and pieces and discards the rest, maybe that’s the answer. I have no idea.
PS: I sometimes use AI to generate the images on this newsletter here, because I’m curious about the outputs and I don’t have art skills. But I don’t use it to write. I know how to write, and I love writing. Writing is how I think. Why would I let AI think for me? If I fell into the mirror like that, I’d never come back out again.
Things I wrote this week: