Humane’s hope for a screenless, seamless, succession.

San Francisco / USA

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San Francisco / USA 〰️

Image: Humane

In Greek mythology the Titan Prometheus defied Zeus, the king of the gods by stealing fire from the heavens and giving it to mortals. In doing so Prometheus granted people like you and I knowledge, and the ability to thrive which had previously belonged to the gods alone.

Unbound from Mount Olympus, fire and knowledge spread throughout humanity, but for his defiance—Prometheus was punished. Zeus chained him to a rock on Mount Caucasus where he was forced to endure daily torment, refusing to yield to Zeus's demands. After many years, Prometheus was freed but the Titan’s acts painted him as both a betrayer, and a hero in history. An emblem of the enduring human spirit, our pursuit of knowledge, and the consequences of challenging divine authority.

Enter Pandora.

Pandora was the first human woman created by the gods. As a gift from Zeus, she was given a container which was likely a jar, but has come to be known as a ‘box’. The gods placed myriad troubles and miseries inside and warned Pandora not to open it. One day, overcome by curiosity, she succumbed. Lifting the lid of the box, Pandora released all the evils into the world including sickness, despair and greed. So she closed the the box tightly—leaving only one thing inside.

Prometheus and Pandora. Images: Midjourney

This week consumer technology company Humane launches its first product—the Ai Pin. The much hyped device (ICYMI, Naomi Campbell walking for fashion brand Coperni was the first person outside the company to wear it at Paris Fashion Week) is the first step towards the “screenless, seamless, sensing,” future Humane, founded by former Apple engineering and design execs Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, envisions.

The Ai Pin is a small, AI powered companion that magnetically attaches to your clothes. Partly driven by OpenAI’s GPT (CEO Sam Altman is an early Humane investor) the Ai Pin can make calls, send messages, project images onto any surface, and answer questions prompted by the wearer’s voice. In a recent TED Talk, Chaudhri demonstrated the Ai Pin’s ability to sense contextual information through its built-in camera. The device checked the nutritional value of a chocolate bar based on Chaudhri’s personal health history, gave directions in a foreign city, and translated his voice into French in real time.

Naomi Campbell wearing the Ai Pin at Coperni’s SS24 runway. Image: Coperni

The Ai Pin has been named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023, a “brooch that projects calls, apps and more in the palm of your hand,”  “a rounded-corner square thing,” a “$699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24-a-month subscription,” an “omnipresent lapel camera” and “the next iPhone.” Its central premise is secure, personal Ai on-tap, anywhere—a device that “helps you get back into the world,” and “enhances your ability to do so,” said Chaudhri at TED.

Bongiorno and Chaudhri met during a combined near 30 years at Apple designing the types of screen based computer devices—the iPhone, iPad, Watch and Mac OS—their Ai Pin aims to surpass. The iDevices enabled unprecedented proliferation of the internet, birthed the app industry as we know it, and became the bedrock of social media. They took the computational power which was once the domain of clunkier machines, and freed it—spreading it throughout humanity one screen at a time, in ways which have had both Prometheus and Pandora-like effects.

In 2017 Bongiorno and Chaudhri established Humane in a bid to move the needle in a mature market of computing devices which had seen a “decline in innovation” according to Chaudhri in a 2020 Fast Company interview. Central to Humane’s mission is to build “technology that improves the human experience and is born from good intentions” and puts us “back in touch with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.”

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, co-founders of Humane. Image: Humane

Each technological descendant aims to solve a problem, or answer a question its ancestors created. In doing so, these innovations alter our technological landscape, and pose new questions in the process. The iPhone solved the problem of how separate technologies like a phone, the internet, and a music player could converge in an easy to use interface. In doing so, it created the question of how on earth we could get away from all these screens, and back to each other. Cast in this light, removing the screen but retaining the convenience of the technology inside it makes sense. Imagine a world of uninterrupted connectedness and presence—where the glare of the screen is no more, but you can still take photographs, get in touch with loved ones, and send fire memes to your friends.

Sounds good, right?

But if the screen is nowhere then by the same token, basically anything’s up for grabs as a canvas. Freed from Mount Olympus and released from the box, the contents of our digital world knows no bounds. Your wall, clothes, the sounds you hear, even the palm of your hand become the interface. Everything, everywhere, anytime you need it—an emblem of the digital and physical worlds seamlessly integrated, powered by your own personal AI.

Imran Chaudhri at TED showing how his palm could be used as the interface with the Ai Pin. Image: TED

It is too early to know whether the Ai Pin will be a line in the sand moment in the same way that the 2007 announcement of the iPhone was, if and how it will integrate with OpenAI’s new GPT features announced at this week’s Dev Day. The Ai Pin isn’t the first in the lineage of iPhone successors or alternatives (think Google Lens and Meta Ray Bans) nor is it the first from former Apple employees (think Tony Fadell and Nest’s thermostat).

However, it is potentially another step forward for “the disappearing computer” from Walt Mossberg’s seminal essay of the same name, which Chaudhri referenced at TED—and it may just be one of the innovations that gets us smartphone free by 2031, as Future Today Institute founder and CEO Amy Webb predicted at SXSW Sydney last month.

Whatever comes next, we are about to inherit a new technological landscape. We always are—as technology continually evolves—but sometimes it’s more perceivable. With that new landscape will come new questions, so here are some of mine.

• If the information which had previously been bound to screens or larger IoT devices can now be anywhere—will I be more present, or more distracted?

• If I am more “present,” what “presence” will I inhabit? It seems unlikely to be the old, familiar-but-faded, pre-screens, real-world present—but how present will I feel in an amalgam of the digital and physical, with a personal Ai at my side?

• When the palm of my own hand is the interface—is it even an interface anymore?

• Will the Ai Pin come with the chic Coperni blazers Naomi and the other models wore from Paris Fashion Week? (Asking for a friend…)

Images: Coperni

As I write this on my MacBook periodically checking my iPhone, I am glad people so intimately acquainted with their designs are working to free the compute, and more, from them—and aiming to propel our relationship with technology, each other, and the world around us forward in the process.

I am also struck at how Prometheus and Pandora’s tales—taking something from the gods and unleashing it into humanity with contrasting outcomes—mirror the dual potential for the new technologies we inherit and how we use them.

But if you feel the old “Prometheus good/Pandora bad,” narrative is a little black and white—here’s the rub. Mythology tells us their stories are causal. That Pandora was created and sent to humanity as a result of Prometheus’ act. No progress through Prometheus? No Pandora—and no awareness of that one last thing that was left inside the box she closed in haste.

What was it? It was hope.

We are due for an evolution of the devices we use. Humane’s Ai Pin certainly hopes to be a part of it.