I also think we’ll see more compute power embedded in headsets. Here’s something I was working on three or four years ago. [Fadell pulls out a thin, gray, behind-the-ear pair of headphones.] You just put them behind your ear. That’s it, no cell phone needed. I can’t tell you where I was building these, but the issue was it was just a standard voice interface before, not a chat interface.
And I’ve been very clear on this: Fuck the metaverse. I’ve said it many times. I think VR is incredibly great for certain things, I think AR’s even better for certain things, but the future's not “wear headsets all the time.”I believe we’ve let technology, and technology creators, just build things unfettered. There’s been a lot of supposed progress that has not been thoughtful and not been responsible. I have a lot of concerns on the role tech plays in youths’ lives.
But my current lens on life also isn’t “let’s dump our technology in the ocean! Let’s go back to paper and pen!” In fact, I don’t think I even know how to write with a pen anymore. So I obviously have a very, very big love-hate relationship with the phone. I think the future of the phone is that the experience becomes distributed. In a way this is already happening, like in the way your Apple Watch talks to you. And I think the attempts to build smart glasses will make a comeback. I think, in the future, we’ll stop carrying the phone. And we won’t actually talk on the phone anymore. We’ll communicate a lot in voice notes and will rely on devices where it’s easier to communicate in voice notes.
But to go back to my original point: We need to convince people to invest more in responsible tech. Right now there is this black hole that is AI sucking in everyone with any smarts, skills, talent, degrees. There has to be enough of a reason for people to keep developing in other spaces, too, and enough of a desire to build thoughtful physical experiences at the same time. And I think how we value that is going to be a societal decision.
Wow an article about technology instead of a hit piece on a popular author written by a trashy wannabe journalist. Good job!