This past Wednesday, September 25, Amazon announced a veritable boatload of new gadgets. There were smart night lights, smart microwaves, smart glasses, and even smart rings; but despite the seemingly random nature of the devices that were announced, they all shared a common thread: a stark and clearly intentional lack of displays.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t think Amazon is doing this for altruistic reasons. These gadget announcements definitely aren’t part of some elaborate scheme to usher in a screenless utopian future that Jeff Bezos envisioned during an acid trip at Burning Man. Rather, this is most likely a logical strategic move for Amazon. The company’s smartphones and tablets aren’t exactly outselling those from Apple and Samsung, but its Alexa-enabled smart speakers are a massive hit with consumers — so it makes sense for the company to double (or quintuple) down on what’s working and pump out a bunch more voice-controlled gadgets.
Still, regardless of Amazon’s underlying motives, it seems to be steering us toward a world that isn’t so dominated by glowing, blinking, attention-stealing screens — and that’s something I think we can all get behind.
At this point, it’s no secret that screen overload is a problem. Numerous bestselling books have been written on the subject, and countless scientific studies have examined how screens affect us physically, mentally, and socially. But you don’t have to read anything to see the trend.
Evidence of our problematic relationship with screens can be found everywhere. People do digital detoxes now. Phubbing (a word that describes the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by looking at your phone instead of paying attention) is now an official word in many dictionaries. Companies have even developed glasses and contact lenses that allegedly protect your eyeballs from the retina-ruining levels of blue light emanating from our monitors, tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches. Don’t even get me started on texting and driving.
Yet, in spite of the fact that screen overload is such a widely recognized problem, screens are still an omnipresent part of modern life. We just can’t seem to kick the habit. Why? Because up until very recently, there wasn’t any other option. The high-tech world we’ve built for ourselves runs on clicking, tapping, and entering text — and all of those things require you to focus your attention on some sort of display.
It doesn’t have to be like this, though. Speech recognition technology is now advanced enough for us to perform web searches, set reminders, dictate text messages, and even control smart home devices using nothing but spoken commands. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for that list to expand. If we could bake this technology into more screenless devices — things like headphones, rings, and non-AR glasses — it would theoretically allow us to enjoy the benefits of mobile technology without constantly having to disconnect from the physical world and stare into a liquid crystal distraction.
If we’re ever going to break the cycle and return to a world where screens don’t command our attention so much, we need more devices that allow us to interact with technology exclusively via voice — and that’s precisely what Amazon is building.
Now to be fair, Amazon definitely isn’t pioneering something new here. Google and Apple also have voice assistants that you can talk to through your headphones, Facebook is apparently building a set of voice-controlled smart glasses, and startups all over the globe have been working on stuff like this for years.
As such, I don’t think what Amazon is doing is special because it’s innovative or new — it’s special simply because it’s Amazon that’s doing it. There’s no other company on earth that can popularize something with sheer brute force quite like Amazon. Look at Kindles. Look at Echo Dots. Look at Prime Day. If there’s any company that’s going to bring voice control to the masses and eventually get us to the point where screens aren’t such an oppressively essential part of everyday life, I think it’s Amazon.
It feels weird to say, but for once, I think the company is pushing our technological world in the right direction.
…Now if only it could pay its fair share of taxes and give employees a reasonable wage!
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.