2023 Finally Swallows The Lapel Pin
Forget pesky pointy accomplishment pins, just wear a damn device.
The Teardown
Friday:: December 1st, 2023
What’s a lapel pin these days? Is it an ornament? Does it highlight an accomplishment? Does it add or subtract from a particular style? Your answer might be that it’s (D) all of the above. Wikipedia says:
Lapel pins are frequently used as symbols of achievement and belonging in different organizations. Lapel pins from the organization are often collected by members and non-members alike.
Check out an example pin below, artfully completing an outfit that might be sourced from a Connecticut yacht-club holiday party:
In that environment, with a jacket requirement, the pin is a near-must. Many jackets and sport coats are stitched together with fabric on which a pin, if appropriate for the setting, communicates its owners pedigree. The particular area of fabric I’m talking about is the lapel.
But suppose I’m not wearing a sport coat. Instead, it’s ninety-eight degrees outside and humid, as it sometimes is here outside of New York City. I might be wearing a jacket if I’m attending that yacht-club summer party, but I’m probably wearing a t-shirt otherwise because I’m not oblivious to weather.
In those moments, the lapel does not exist. T-shirts don’t have them. T-shirts shouldn’t have them. If I’m suddenly granted the opportunity to wear a lapel pin, where does it go? In the same spot? That would be strange.
So, let’s of course, take one step deeper into the muck. Suppose my outfit relies not on an ornamental pin, but instead, a full-blown device designed to replace your smartphone.
What?
The Ultimate Power(ed) Lapel
When you imagine (as one does) a lapel pin, maybe you think of something simpler than my first image. Something like this:
The pin is appropriately understated but certainly indicative of a passed-through-generations waterway navigation prowess. All kidding aside, you’re wearing a small but fashionable piece that fits a jacket worn during some sort of coast-aligned activity.
Do you dream (of course, always) of a lapel pin that levels up your style and connectivity, allowing you to resolve the most stubborn disagreements among friends through one simple tap of your lapel? If so, you’re in luck.
Meet, the Humane AI Pin (“Pin”). Disclaimer: This is a very deep V-neck!
There’s too much happening in this picture. We’re going to gloss over most of it and focus on two parts:
This person is wearing a jacket, as one might expect when wearing a lapel pin. To be honest, it looks a little bulky. They need a tailor, or I need to rethink my cocktail attire (and maybe t-shirt) strategy.
The lapel pin is really something else. It’s not a pin in the traditional sense, and not a device you’d expect to see on a person. What device would you expect to see a person wearing? Hold your thoughts - we’ll get there. This jacket is adorned with a piece of flair that looks like an iPod shuffle from 2010:
To my point about unwelcome disagreements among friends, you tap the Pin and ask it to verify the fact in question. If you’re not having enough fun in real-life, tap and ask the Pin if it knows what it is. I would love to know the answer.
The Pin’s voice recognition and AI features turn your fact-checking queries into computational action, translating words to machine-speak and grabbing answers from generative AI sources such as ChatGPT. Humane calls it AI Mic.
You can also display messages on your palm using laser technology. The Pin tells you time, handles to-dos, and makes and receives phone calls. Didn’t you want to do all these things wearing a not-pin on your not-jacket? Me too.
The Verge’s summary paragraph covering the pin describes my confusion:
Humane seems to view the AI Pin as the beginning of a larger project, which is probably correct: it will get better as the underlying models get better, and seemingly the whole tech industry is hard at work looking for new things to do with AI. Humane may hope its device evolves the way the smartphone did: better hardware improves the user experience over time, but the real revolution comes from what you can do with the device. There’s a lot of work left to do on that front, but Humane’s apparently ready to get started.
If that paragraph didn’t mean much to you, don’t worry. I read the full article, and enjoy The Verge, but believe their writers came away as baffled as one does when reviewing an AI-powered lapel pin. What do you do with this device?
The real answer is a dig at our screen-obsessed brains. The Pin replaces your smartphone while avoiding that pesky blue screen that cause doom-scrolling, ADD in kids, car accidents, and many more of society’s most nefarious behaviors.
You know what you can’t do? Not talk to yourself in public. Indeed, to ask the Pin a question, you will need to speak to it while carefully avoiding other people. It’s important to make sure that they aren’t misled into conversing with you when all you want to do is talk to and receive wisdom from your lapel.
What doesn’t yet compute for me is the desire to be completely absent from the screen. Yes, slumping over your screen during every possible opportunity is not ideal, but a screen-less device is not an obviously better option. I’m a heavy Apple users these days, but feel there is one very appropriate form factor that is the best of the Pin and more:
A cellular-connected watch answers questions, receives and sends texts, shows you notifications, and many other things. It doesn’t require lapel-specific sign language to skip a song or reply to a message. You look at your wrist, just like watch-wearers have begrudgingly done for years.
Do We Need To Push The Envelope?
The fundamental question then is not what we can do with the device, but whether we should keep exploring products like the Pin to avoid tinker-oriented brain cell atrophy. The Pin probably doesn’t make sense for anyone except very specific people, and those people will embrace it.
The rest of us may instead benefit from their motivation, their work, and the tech that flows outwards and into more mass-appeal consumer devices.
I’m reminded of another category of devices that’s remarkably alive and well: smart glasses. Many of you once saw these:
It was a stretch to call Google Glass “glasses.” That picture is from a 2013 article in Wired in which Mat Honan described his experience with Google Glass. And, ten years later, here’s where we are:
Meta’s smart Ray-Bans look much better than Google Glass. Like the Pin, these sun-blockers include a camera and the obviously-needed connectivity to our AI overlords.
Would I buy them? Maybe. Do I need them? No. Am I so engrossed in my phone at all times that I must augment my reality with smart glasses? Unclear. In that 2013 article, Mat Honan described Glass with phrasing that is eerily useful today:
My Glass experiences have left me a little wary of wearables because I'm never sure where they're welcome. I’m not wearing my $1,500 face computer on public transit where there’s a good chance it might be yanked from my face. I won’t wear it out to dinner, because it seems as rude as holding a phone in my hand during a meal. I won’t wear it to a bar. I won’t wear it to a movie. I can’t wear it to the playground or my kid's school because sometimes it scares children.
It is pretty great when you are on the road — as long as you are not around other people, or do not care when they think you're a knob.
Google Glass was a objectively strange-looking device, of course. The Humane AI Pin doesn’t look as strange but has equally strange intentions.
But bold bets are important in life. People assume huge risks to start companies that revolutionize physical products, software, media, and more. Designers stretch the limits of physical product technology and appeal in part to demonstrate that we don’t have to stick to the status quo. Sometimes, anyways.
Two earlier posts of mine touched on this trend, starting with a blurb from five-and-a-half years ago when I commented on an Inc magazine article about companies trying to disrupt every consumer category:
I understand some products appear to be comfortable candidates for disruption, but I am often flabbergasted by the attention paid to the seemingly useless product categories. Eye-glasses are an essential part of every-day life for many people. Napkins, hopefully, are not. Aren't there critical problems to solve? Aren't their more exciting categories to disrupt? Other holistic ideas to synergize? Some companies are asinine. I know I don't have all the facts, but I'm also not making napkins. Call it a draw.
In commenting on that Inc article, I poked at some smart person trying to make better napkins. The lapel pin, like the napkin, doesn't seem to be a product that requires the attention of lots of smart people and gobs of flammable investor money. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and quite useful. Connected watches are convenient and not too obtrusive. Disrupting the status quo or succumbing to pressure from companies dominating these categories is tricky at best.
There’s one last category I’ll highlight: vehicles. Automakers roll out concept cars at various global auto shows throughout the calendar year. These concepts are sometimes purely show and sometimes full of hints at things to come in every day production vehicles. Putting aside pure city-dwellers in places like Boston, Chicago, and New York, lots of people have or need a vehicle to get from one place to another.
So, I would be silly not to mention one rocket launch through the barrier of acceptable product design:
It’s the Tesla Cybertruck again. I wrote about it four years ago.
Will lots of people buy the Cybertruck? Probably not. But it, like its founder and company siblings (Model S, etc.), pushes the rest of the industry forward in considering bolder design and technology. We’ll never know for sure if the Cybertruck individually motivated Ford to build the F-150 Lighting, but if it played even a small part, I don’t think we ended up with a terrible outcome:
Whether you think the F-150 Lighting is useful, needed, or even good-looking, it’s hard to deny what happened: Ford restructured one of the best-selling vehicles of all-time with electric propulsion and complimentary looks and features.
Many truck buyers will avoid the Cybertruck, but they will absolutely look at the F-150 Lighting. Ford already can’t keep with demand. It will be fascinating to see the breadth of the electric vehicle category ten years from now.
So, to the folks at Humane, and to the AI Pin that is the butt of this post, we wish you best of luck. Please also evolve the t-shirt so I have somewhere to wear this thing.
I trust just one person to tell me about a better napkin and I know it's you, only you!
Commenting so I can come back to this later. Took me a minute to realize the lapel pin was a real product and not you writing satire. I’ll also return with thoughts on how napkins might be disrupted, if I can.