CES: AI gibberish overwhelms a tech showcase
Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was unlike anything from years past, said Imad Khan in CNET. Sure, like every year, the world’s largest tech showcase featured “a flurry of dazzling gadgetry: giant televisions, robots, EVs, and foldable phones.” The difference was that “just about every piece of tech” claimed to have some relationship with artificial intelligence. There were AI lamps, AI lawn mowers, AI vacuums, AI mirrors, AI dog collars, “even AI pillows.” A few years back, “refrigerators and toasters were ‘smart.’” This “new wave of AI is, in a sense, a rebranding” of that. “It’s not hard to imagine C-suite executives pounding on boardroom conference tables demanding AI be a cornerstone in future products.” You can’t blame them, but you do have to wonder if all this new “tech for tech’s sake” is counterproductive to AI’s actual mission.
Does one really need an AI toothbrush? asked James Clayton in BBC.com. There’s “an AI washing machine that can purportedly detect different types of fabric.” A Samsung representative said, “This will learn your clothes.” Huh? The lack of any real definition for “AI” means almost any product can try riding the wave of “a blistering year of hype,” even if it uses hardly any actual machine learning. Looking past the marketing puffery, some cool CES products still “tell us what creative minds in tech—human, not AI—are thinking these days,” said Shara Tibken in The Wall Street Journal. An indoor meat smoker by GE that “lets you hot-smoke brisket, pork ribs, and salmon without going outside” won best in show. There was a pair of eyeglasses that can also serve as a hearing aid. And a new TV from Samsung promises glarefree technology that “might be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.”
Yet you have to wonder how relevant
CES remains today, said Alex Hern in
The Guardian. Smartphones “all but killed the ‘gadget,’” which got replaced by apps. And the big tech companies long ago figured out that they didn’t want their big product launches to disappear in a big convention hall. CES is now less about the future than about “a thousand cheap knockoffs.” There was also a sense of unease on the convention floor, said Derek Robertson in Politico. “The breadth of regulators who traveled” from Washington was staggering. Panels were “stacked with officials from the National Security Council, Treasury Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and others.” It was a reminder “of just how many emerging tech issues are facing Washington at once,” from AI to antitrust to geopolitical tensions with China. “Elections are looming,” and the industry is increasingly worried that tech’s endless party may be close to ending.