Washing machines liberated women to get soul-crushing jobs that ate up their free time. Social media gave the world one revolution before it destabilised democracies everywhere else. Now AI is here, and its main job seems to be replacing screenwriters. It's easy to fall into techno-pessimism, but new documentary Seeing into the Future (Sunday 23 November, 8pm, BBC Two) has a different angle. For disabled people, tech has already brought about life-changing advancements. And we haven't seen anything yet.
Another company is throwing a pair of smart glasses into the ring. Chinese tech giant Alibaba unveiled its first smart glasses, the Quark AI Glasses, in July, and they are officially on pre-sale starting today, Oct. 24. Could they be Meta Ray-Bans' newest rival? The AI-infused glasses are powered by the company's Qwen large language model, which already has over 400 million downloads and 140,000 derivative downloads, Alibaba wrote in a press release at the time.
Last month, AI startup Friend launched an eyebrow-raising advertising campaign in the New York City subway, which drew a striking amount of hatred. The largely white billboards left a convenient amount of room for passersby to air their feelings about the privacy-infringing tech. As such, it didn't take long for handwritten scribbles to cover the ads. "Befriend something alive," one pen-wielding tagger wrote. "AI wouldn't care if you lived or died," another vandal raged.
If you haven't already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion-a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace-you probably also have not seen Friend's recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I'll binge the entire series with you.
"Um ... there we go ... uh-oh," said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage as he attempted to answer a video call through a combination of movements between a wristband and a pair of glasses. "Well, I ... let's see what happened there ... that's too bad," he continued, shortly before cutting short the live demo. The video call went unanswered.
