Category: Smartphones

  • Will AIs Ever Laugh?

    On jokes, AI, and troubles with The Turing Test. It’s the second laugh that interests me because it tells us something about what happens under the hood when we read or hear a joke. Recently, I picked up a terrific joke from an unlikely source: “My mother is over 100 and fit as a fiddle because…

  • B.L.U.E. revisited…

    In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever). Here’s the context from The Dispatch: Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • What Will an AI Hardware Device Look Like?

    Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and Masayoshi Son have announced a new “iPhone of Artificial Intelligence,” but what will such a device actually look like? Late in September, breathless stories hit about a new “iPhone of Artificial Intelligence” hardware device collaboration among Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO), Sir Jony Ive (the guy who designed the iPhone), and…

  • What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?

    The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…

  • Apple’s Vision Pro: What Will it Take to Go Big?

    The newest product from the world’s most valuable company will transform the world, but not for quite some time. I’ve been hesitant to write about Apple’s new “spatial computing” device: the thing that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t want to call an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. However, since there are things that I haven’t seen…

  • Adventures in Self-Disruption

    Apple is preparing to cannibalize its most profitable product, the iPhone. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. Remember the Newton? This week in The New York Times, we learned about uncharacteristic debate in the executive ranks at Apple around the long-awaited Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that the company will release in June. Some execs worry that there is…

  • CES, Paradigm Shifts, Spandrels, and Collateral Damage

    What this week’s Consumer Electronics Show has to do with death of cursive writing in American schools, how to break down the elements of disruption, and more. I spent the week leading tours of the automotive hall at CES with my friends at StoryTech. (My favorite exhibit was the quietly transformative What3Words.) As we explored new Electric…

  • Why it’s so hard to think

    Digital technologies crowd out our analog ability to make connections. That’s a problem since analogical thinking is what makes us human. In the middle of the night, Sting’s song “Moon over Bourbon Street” went through my head. I hadn’t thought of it in years, maybe decades. I love Sting, but I hadn’t listened to his…

  • A Simple Test for What Counts as “The Metaverse”

    Lots of walled gardens and videogame platforms are now touting themselves as part of the metaverse, but there’s an easy way to tell if it’s true. Plus, revising Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Two shorter (although slightly connected) main stories this week… 1. Revisiting Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” If you subscribe to…