No, The Smartphone Isn’t Broken.
Why all those AI gadgets keep failing while your phone keeps winning.
Last week the tech world was rather chuffed that Jony Ive, the industrial designer who helped turn Apple’s fortunes around was teaming up with Sam Altman of OpenAi to create a new AI driven device. Aesthetically, a nice idea. Practically? Perhaps not. Smartphones are nearly 20 years old. They’ve become culturally invisible, in that we just all use them without really thinking about them.
The rabbit r1 device flopped quite quickly. The Humane AI pin was a disaster. Google is about to launch a new set of smartglasses years after the first iteration was laid to waste by the visceral disgust of culture en masse. As a digital anthropologist who works at the intersection of culture and technology, I’m not sure that culture is all that interested in yet another device. Why?
The technology industry is on a constant, fever pitched search to upgrade what exists and to create a whole new category. The smartphone was arguably the last digital device to open up a whole new category and spin off into a sub-industry of gadgets and accessories. Some pundits proclaim the smartphone has stagnated. Design perhaps. In reality, the smartphone has stabilised.
The smartphone isn’t just a tool, it’s become a “cultural pattern”, a fundamental tool for organising and living life in the digital age. Smartphones have become a central node through which social and business relationships, economic transactions and identity performance flow. That’s remarkably impressive for a relatively short time of cultural exposure. Globally.
Smartphones have shown themselves to have formed structural coupling with human social systems. What that means is that these devices fit quite snugly into almost all aspects of our social systems from art and music to paying for things, navigating the world through maps, paying for things.
Smartphones didn’t just solve problems. They created an entire ecosystem of complementary technologies (e.g. earbuds, watches) and slid into our social norms and most importantly, our cognitive habits.
So What About AI Devices?
The more friction and social viscosity there is around a new technology, the harder it will be for that technology to become successful and accepted by culture. Smartphones reduced friction by consolidating a number of devices and tools. The cool factor was a social signal, especially the iPhone and later the Samsung Galaxy as well. This is less social viscosity, which is good.
But AI devices require people to learn new ways of interacting (voice, gestures), create new social norms around when, where and how to use them. To figure out how to integrate them into existing systems with tools that do what the AI device can and more. Then trust them with tasks smartphones already handle quite fine.
These AI devices are attempting to establish a cultural code around “intelligence” and “efficiency” but culture hasn’t yet identified efficiency is a problem that needs solving by an additional piece of hardware and most consumers don’t even get what “intelligence” means with regard to such devices.
The cultural distance between “I want my phone to be smarter” and “I want to wear a new device that talks to me” is quite vast.
We may well be in that classic predicament with many technologies of a solution in search of a problem. I simple ask, what fundamental human need do these AI devices address or serve that smartphones don’t? I can’t find one. Yet. So it’s a sort of technological determinism of tech giants who tend to view the world through a singular lens.
These AI devices are swimming against cultural currents right now (privacy concerns, tech fatigue, cognitive overload) while creating new problems (yet another device, more subscription fees likely, new social norms and etiquette, more battery anxiety.)
There will likely be a small niche market for these devices. The adherents to all things AI will proclaim it is the future. Perhaps. But that future is a little farther off than some might think.
Do consumers want another device to fit in their daily routines. Before leaving the house that means; smartglasses, smartwatch, smartphone, AI device (hoping they’re all charged), keys, wallet, backpack or purse.
One might imagine the AI device replacing all these devices. Aside from the massive infrastructure and terrible way devices interconnect, it’s just now how humans use technologies right now. That kind of change needs enormous cultural shifts that are exceedingly rare.
It’s a very bold statement for OpenAI to declare it’s making a device. It’s a huge challenge for Jony Ive to put his name to such a device at a precarious time. Maybe it won’t be a gadget worn like a pin or around the neck.
Ive and Altman have hopefully learned from the disaster of the Humane AI pin and rabbit r1. Great ideas, but culture just wasn’t ready for them. Nor was the infrastructure they needed.
I may well be wrong. Someone out there may have, probably has, figured out what will replace the smartphone. It happens all the time. From what I’ve seen to date however, it doesn’t seem to be on the near horizon.