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Bad reviews of the AI PIN indicate that the phone cannot be replaced.
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But I don’t want to replace phone. I love staring at my iPhone.
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I regret that I can’t look at my phone more hours of the day.
I was excited for the AI Pin, I really was. When the phone-replacing wearable was announced this fall, I was a little unsure about how normal people could use it, but I was reassured by a strange new category of gadget, something creative and ambitious. and new.
Unfortunately, the reviews of the AI Pin so far have been terrible. They point out that it only works half the time, overheats, and generally fails at its biggest ambition: to be a screen-free replacement for your phone.
All the problems with the AI Pin aside (I recommend this review from The Verge if you’re more curious), I keep coming back to the central thesis of the device – that you want a way to avoid looking at your phone – and scratch my head . Who says I don’t want to look at my phone screen? I love looking at my phone!
There are two arguments here: the practical and the existential.
The practical argument for a non-phone device that can do things like a phone is that you can do simple tasks without the distraction of ads and other phone temptations. I agree – that’s a good thing. Setting a timer, composing a text while driving, getting a quick weather report in the morning – these are all great situations without using a phone. Fortunately, we have voice assistants like Alexa and Siri that have been around for over a decade that already do that.
There are also the Ray-Ban Meta glasses that take videos and photos – ideal for hands-free situations, such as riding a roller coaster, dancing or attending a concert. They’re objectively neat gadgets, cool for certain uses, and their AI element will likely lead to more useful ways to use them. But I don’t think they want to replace your phone.
Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal used the AI PIN with the Meta Ray-Bans on her recent family vacation and found the wearable camera feature to be great for capturing quick moments with her kids. She was glad she didn’t have to take out her phone: “You know the dance. You take out your phone, snap a photo, then some message or notification distracts you. It felt good to keep my phone in my backpack for the most part. these vacations,” she wrote.
That practical reason – a phone can be a distraction when all you want to do is take a photo – can be very reasonable and relatable!
But then there is the other argument, more existential against the phones: We spend all our free moments with a screen shopped in front of us, scroll mindlessly for dopamine and ignore the world around us. Time spent on your phone is bad; time well spent doing anything else.
This argument I cannot get on board with. I love mindless scrolling; I like it a lot. I love scrolling through TikTok, browsing tweets, poking around Reddit. I will join the group chat. Maybe if I have some extra time, I’ll go to my happy place and watch some movie trailers on YouTube.
I strongly oppose the idea that spending time away from your phone is somehow better. What am I supposed to do, go for a walk and look at the trees? Do you have any idea how many articles there are that I haven’t read?
I also resist the idea that, as a parent, I should neglect my phone to be more “present” with my family. I spend periods of time during the day giving each child my undivided attention – I’m not a monster. But I don’t think it’s necessary to give ALL of your time your undivided attention to young children; they should be slightly ignored — it promotes independence.
Frankly, I’m not worried about not being present. I can multitask. I am able to process many attentional inputs at the same time; I’m running multiple teraflops; my momcompute is so abundant Sam Altman wants to get the UAE to invest in it. Looking at my texts is not what will pull me from being “present.” I am ever is not present. And I bet that’s true for you, too.
I admit that it doesn’t matter what model phone parents use for their children – it’s not great to have a phone in your face all day and then try to convince a child that they need to put the iPad down . There is a happy and healthy medium here. I’m not saying you should miss your kid’s first steps because you’re tweeting, but I think there’s zero guilt in checking email while you’re watching “Frozen” for the 20th time.
There is a lot of concern at the moment about how phones could affect young people. The correlation between phones and teen mental health is debatable, but it is very valid that they want to limit social media and screen time for teens and children.
However, I am not a teenager. I am an adult. Don’t confuse the conversations about phones being bad for 15 year olds with phones being bad for adults.
The simplest part of the phones-are-bad-for-kids argument is that screen time could be much better spent on other things, like personal socialization or sleep. This is true for teenagers, and maybe a little bit true for adults too. (Sure, I’d probably be better off with an extra 20 minutes of sleep.) But I’m an adult with a fully formed frontal lobe that already shaped my social skills in my formative years.
One advantage of being old now is that my phone can’t hurt me. I can handle looking at Instagram and seeing my friends at a good time and I simply feel happy for them. I can watch as much TikTok as I want and the only thing that happens is that I now know teenage slang words and learn about the lives of people I’ve never met in real life. Haha! Mental scrolling only increases my powers.
I don’t want to be rude, so I try to follow decent phone etiquette. I don’t look at my phone in a restaurant, in a movie theater, or when I’m talking to someone. I like my Apple Watch for this reason: It allows me to put my phone away in social situations without worrying about missing an important text or call. I understand that there are applications and situations where something other than a great phone would be.
But I don’t want to replace my phone. I don’t want to downgrade to a dumb phone as some ploy to get my attention back from greedy tech companies. I don’t think my consciousness would rise to a higher plane if I could only tear myself away from the 2,000-nit light of my iPhone 14 Pro Max. As far as I’m concerned, the smartphone is the pinnacle of humanity. I love him, I respect him, and I am grateful for him. I don’t look at this amazing gift of human technology and think, “I would be happier without it.”
If anything, my only wish is that I could look at my phone more.
Read the original article on Business Insider
