“Deserve Better” how, exactly?
Humane, the secretive tech startup full of interesting ex-Apple people has started pulling the curtain back on whatever it is they’ve been building. The rumor mill has always swirled around them, they’re supposedly building some flavor of “AI-powered” wearable that’s intended as the next jump after smartphones. Gruber at DaringFireball has a nice writeup on the latest reveals at https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/if_you_come_at_the_king.
And good luck to them! The tech industry can always use more big swings instead of another VC-funded arbitrage/gig-economy middle-man app, and they’re certainly staffed with folks that would have a take on “here’s what I’d do next time.”
Gruber also links to this tweet from Chaudhri, Humane’s co-founder: https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1624041258778763265. To save you a click, Chaudhri retweets another tweet that has side-by-side pictures of the NBA game where LeBron James broke the scoring record and the 1998 game-winning shot by Michael Jordan. The key difference being, of course, that in the newer shot everyone in the stands has their phone out taking a picture, and in the older shot there are no cameras of any kind. And Chaudhri captions this with “we all deserve better.”.
And this is just the strangest possible take. There are plenty of critiques of both smart phones and the way society has reorganized around then, but “everyone always has a professional grade camera on them” is as close to an unambiguous net positive as has emerged from the post–iPhone world.
Deserve better, in what way, exactly?
If everyone was checking work email and missing the shot, that’d be one thing. But we all deserve better than… democratizing pro-grade photography? What?
As techno-cultural critiques go, “People shouldn’t take photos of places they go,” is somewhere between Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds and just flatly declaring smart phones to be a moral evil, with a vague whiff of “leave the art of photography to your betters.”
Normally, this is the kind of shitposting on twitter you’re roll your eyes and ignore, but this is they guy who founded a company to take a swing at smartphones, so his thoughts on how they fit into the world presumably heavily influence what they’re building?
And weirdly, all this has made me more interested in what they’re building? Because any attempt to build “the thing that comes after the iPhone” would by definition need to start with a critique of what the iPhone and other smartphones do and do not do well. A list of problems to solve, things to get right this time. And never in a million years would it have occurred to me that “people like to take pictures of where they are” is a problem that needed solving.