CES diary day one: AI everything

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas combines the tech world's most incredible, weirdest, and most useless impulses in one show. You get a sneak peek at the gadgets and gear that will make a splash in the coming year. It’s 2 million square feet, 200,000 people, and 5,000 companies coming together to showcase the best that Silicon Valley and the world have to offer. It also is acres of silly products no one needs. Does your oven need to have Alexa integration? Probably not. Does a massage chair need to have artificial intelligence? I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.

The name of the game this year is AI. Every conceivable product touts its integration with this burgeoning tech. The usefulness of a large language model for your toilet remains to be seen. But it’s the hot piece of technology every journalist and company is keen to promote, so it’s ubiquitous.

Landing in Vegas and driving into the Strip always reminds me of how much Vegas is America distilled into a city. Not the civic-minded ideals of Americana, but rather a decadent corporation that can fulfill every desire our late-stage capitalist society can imagine. It’s opulence and vice, charisma and cringe, all in a desert mirage. Now with a giant sphere staring at tourists with its all-seeing eye, but more on that next post.

David Becker/Formula 1/Getty Images

Getting in midday, I decided to stick to the Venetian and Wynn to explore their convention halls. I’ve always loved walking Eureka Park, reserved for up-and-coming startup companies hunting for VC money. There’s a fantastic vibe of enthusiasm and pure entrepreneurial spirit mixed with huckster vibes, making for an exhilarating atmosphere.

There’s also the reminder of why technology can be so cool when it can benefit society in novel ways. I saw two companies trying to help blind people with haptic inputs to help them “see” the world. One company used a cane with inputs for blind children, and the other used glasses to help blind people walk around by buzzing when something was blocking their paths. That’s pretty darn cool.

You can also find Daymond John from "Shark Tank" promoting an amazing wireless TV.

Invariably, there will be tech that terrifies you. Going through the Amazon House of the Future was one of those moments. There are beds that track your sleep patterns and glasses that allow you to talk to Alexa 24/7 as it pumps sound into your brain.

As well as baby's first touch screen.

But what was truly disturbing was the hell-spawned monstrosity of creepiness called Moxie. It’s a robot/doll with a human-like face that uses ChatGPT to “talk” to young children. It’s almost impossible to express how off-putting this product was.

Creepy kids robot has emotions! 😳😳😳 youtube.com

In the future, we won’t have to raise our children; we can just rely on demonic AI androids to do it for us. And if you resist they can send a different AI robot to hunt you down.