Member-only story
What the AI Pin misunderstands about Star Trek
Humane and Bill Gates are leaping forward into a future without apps that resembles the sci-fi world of Star Trek. What do we need to do to catch up with their vision?
Humane’s Ai Pin “marks a new beginning for personal consumer technology, offering users the ability to take AI with them everywhere in an entirely new, conversational and screenless form factor.” In plain English, it is a wearable with an artificial intelligence-powered assistant that does everything your phone can, but without a screen. It is remarkably similar, in both function and design, to the communicator pin or “combadge” that the likes of Kirk, Spock, and later Picard wore.
I’m far from the first person to compare this futuristic pager to Star Trek’s standard combadge. Starfleet personnel are outfitted in uniforms complete with a pin of Starfleet’s iconic crest. This pin is the communicator, which can be activated with a quick touch. From there, users execute voice commands like, “Computer, locate Commander LaForge.” or “Computer, run whole crew diagnostic scan.”
Humane’s Ai Pin not only takes inspiration from Star Trek’s communicator’s wearability, but also from the 1960’s vision of human-computer interaction. Voice commands are king, and there are no apps to download and manage, just the user and the omnipotent, all-powerful computer.
This was the vision of the future Rodenberry envisioned decades ago. In his endorsement of Humane’s Ai Pin, Bill Gates seems to concur. He has foretold the death of apps and the rise of “agents.”
