This song makes you feel like an alien. Its production is so distorted that you might as well be playing it on a cassette tape that you’ve just unearthed, bent, from a pile of rubble on your first exploratory trip to Earth. And the video isn’t far off: a single frame shows a guy on the sidewalk in front of a Mini Mart, dancing in slow-mo until the beat picks up, at which point he breaks it down in a way that obscures whether he’s human or robot. Is this what we want the extraterrestrials to know about us? Maybe any artifact is enough; “it’s nice to be alive,” isn’t it.
When I first read about the guy who had implanted his Tesla key into his hand, my first thought was, “I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already.” Then, I learned, it had. This guy has a total of four chips and two magnets living in his body, each for its own specific task (mostly opening other things, like doors and computers). His body his choice and all, but you have to wonder, will all the login time he’s saving surpass the number of days he’s shaving off his life through radiation or foreign-object-rejection or whatever? Or maybe it’s worthwhile for the fun he’s having impressing people. We <3 the future.
Or maybe in the future our smart devices will be outside our bodies. That’s the rub this year at CES, where Samsung just unveiled a ball prototype called Ballie (pronounced, “Ball-E,” like the Pixar film) that follows you around the house doing a series of tasks that no one seems to be able to understand. In the demo, it made a beep-boop noise when a person said “hi” in its vicinity, and otherwise, it appears to connect with other smart-home devices— a function that your smartphone, which is already following you around by way of your pocket, was literally designed for. So while we wait for a clear utility, or even launch date, rest easy with this equally vague statement from Samsung: “We see on-device AI as central to truly personalized experiences. On-device AI puts you in control of your information and protects your privacy, while still delivering the power of personalization.” (And they have the balls to prove it.)
