Tech Innovations and Flops: A Deep Dive

To the average person, it might look like I’m about to commit shoplifting as I place item after item into my shopping cart and then leave without checking out, scanning my items, or talking to anyone. But I’m not shoplifting; I’m using technology. You see, this is a new type of store that uses sensors, cameras, and AI to track me through the aisles, adding every item that I pick up to a virtual cart. The moment I exit the store, it charges my account. It’s an incredible new technology created by Amazon called Just Walk Out, and it’s in dozens of Amazon Fresh grocery stores just like this one.

I’m not just going to not eat them, okay? Anyway, where was I in the script before I became a criminal? Oh yeah, they’re an incredible new technology. They’re called Amazon Fresh stores, and they are a gigantic lie. You see, while Amazon was touting these stores as a cashier-less solution that allowed them to use AI to cut out all of the on-location workers, it turns out what it really meant by AI was Anonymous Indians. Amazon’s Just Walk Out stores relied on 1,000 people in India watching, not AI.

The Reality of Just Walk Out Technology

So it turns out that even though they started implementing this technology in stores in like 2016, as of 2023, Amazon still needed a thousand people in India reviewing about 70% of all orders to make sure that it worked. In other words, it didn’t work. It’s just crazy because, like, why did they lie? You know, they didn’t have to implement this technology into stores. I don’t think anyone was asking for this. And yet, I feel like this kind of thing has been happening a lot lately. Tech companies have been taking some big swings and some even bigger misses.

Like so big that in this baseball metaphor, the pitcher is throwing it right down the middle, and the batter is in the stands just bashing some fan’s head in. And that’s why I’ve gathered you here today at Greg Tech 2024 Developer’s Conference, where I will be testing some of the year’s greatest tech flops, starting with the Humane AI Pin.

The Humane AI Pin: A Tech Flop

I did a video on the AI Pin when it was announced months ago as this sort of AI-powered phone-replacing device that you wear on your shirt. Look, personally, I’m all for rethinking the form factor of the smartphone to make it less distractive while still maintaining all of the functionality. But unfortunately, the AI Pin did the opposite of both of those things.

In the demos on their own product announcement, it was screwing up hard. It was messing up facts. It also seemed super difficult to use, and it seemed like they were being intentionally vague about what the thing even did in the first place. It’s a standalone device and software platform. It seemed like the type of thing that literally only a sucker could buy. But that turned out not to be true because I bought one. I ordered this thing in like February and then didn’t hear from them for a few months until April when I got an email alerting me that it was time to set up my account, and boy was I excited.

Setting Up the AI Pin

So I’m going to be honest, I kind of forgot that I bought this. But now my AI Pin is ready to be personalized. Apparently, before we can ship you your AI Pin, you will need to complete a few quick steps. So I have to set it up before they even send it to me. Kind of feels like they’re calling my bluff.

“You don’t really want this thing. How committed are you to the AI Pin? Will you set it up before we even ship it to you?” You probably won’t. Configure your Humane subscription, set up your AI Pin passcode, and add contacts. And honestly, I don’t really want to do those things, but I guess they’re not going to send it to me unless I do.

The AI Pin Setup Experience

It’s time to set up your AI Pin. There comes a time in every young man’s life where he has to set up his AI Pin—a rite of passage. Oh, that’s fun. Woo! Is this it? Am I setting it up? Get a little over here, a little over here. It turns out that in addition to the $700 I spent on this thing, I also had to pay $24 a month to access features like the wireless network, cloud storage, and AI services—which in layman’s terms are all of the things that the Pin does. Luckily, the first three months of this service are free, so I probably will never have to actually pay for it.

Set up your passcode. Okay, could you guys not look? I’m about to type in my secure passcode. Okay, your passcode is easy to guess. Consider setting a more secure passcode. Yeah, but could it be so simple that it’s actually you would never guess it? Alright, I’ll change it. How was that easy to guess? It’s my birthday. I guess that does it know my birthday? Do you know my birthday?

Challenges with the AI Pin

Fun fact: I actually didn’t know this before recording this video, but it turns out almost every single combination of four numbers is easy to guess. How is that easy to guess? Eventually, I reached into the dark recesses of my mind and came up with a number combination so random, so quite frankly disgusting, that no one—not even God, not even me later in this video—will be able to guess it.

Okay, well, let me write this down somewhere so that I don’t forget it. Already using my phone for something because I don’t have the Pin yet, so I have to use the phone to remember the passcode to the thing that is going to replace my phone. Connect your services. Oh, cool. I can connect my Google Photos and Tidal services, which I have both. And just like that, I was done. I have solved Humane riddles, and now they have to send me my prize. Alright, well, I guess the next time you see me, I’m going to have the AI Pin in my possession.

It might even be right here. Okay, we’ll see if I remember to do that transition. I don’t remember the transition I was going to do, so don’t ask.

Receiving and Testing the AI Pin

At first, I was pretty surprised by how big the box was. I thought that I had just ordered a little tiny pin, but I guess it comes with a bunch of accessories, like a sticker that just says Humane. Cool. But you guys don’t care about all that. You guys just want to see the pin, and my God, she was beautiful. Let’s—oh, okay, that’s my bad. No, I thought that it was going to be attached in there more securely. Come on, Danny, you dunce. But a dunce who was about to become half dunce and half machine.

In order to start using the Pin, I had to unlock it with my passcode, which was explained to me via the laser ink display and an extremely coherent AI voice. To enter your password, tap the touchpad on your AI Pin to get started. Then, don’t laser display. Okay, this is kind of crazy, though. Look at this. This is like the weirdest way to type in a number ever. I’m going to do my passcode now. Wrong. I forgot what my passcode was. Incorrect passcode. What would I have made my passcode? I forgot that I made a passcode. I forgot that I wrote the passcode down in my phone.

I tried to click “forgot passcode,” and it told me to go to this website to change it. But somehow, in order to do that, you need to know your existing passcode. Luckily, I recorded me making the passcode, so I could go back and watch the screen recording of me doing it. If I was not a YouTuber recording a video about this product, I think I would be locked out forever. Come on, come on, come on. Please. Yes. Yes. Welcome, Danny. Alright, after months of waiting, I was in. Now it’s time to see what this device is capable of.

Exploring AI Pin Features

What is my name? Your name is not currently known. Please provide it if you would like it to be remembered. Actually, what’s a cool kind of techno-cyber sounding name that you could call me instead? Creating name. How about Neon Vortex? Yeah, call me that. Noting your name as Neon Vortex. I know I might have seemed all cheery and excited about this name on the surface, but the truth is it destroyed me. I have never heard a name before that not only sounded so cool but also so embodied everything I wished I was—suave, confident, futuristic. He was everything—everything I could never be. Neon Vortex.

This is the home screen. I’m all caught up, whatever that means. Nothing to report here, man. Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to worry about. Your AI Pin needs to cool down for a few minutes. What? Yeah, so apparently it does that like a lot. If you use the display for more than 10 minutes or the Pin is in close proximity to a heat source such as, I don’t know, the human body, then it’ll shut itself down so it can cool down for a few minutes. But hey, man, that’s fine with me. You know, that just gives me more time to think—to think about him.

Testing Basic Phone Functionality

The next day, I decided to put the Pin’s basic phone functionality to the test—things like calling, texting, and navigation. Since this thing is essentially supposed to replace your phone, it should be pretty convenient to do all this stuff on the Pin. It should be. The weird thing is it seems like you can’t make any changes to the Pin on the Pin itself for some reason. So if you want to change any settings or add contacts, which I needed to do to test this as a phone, you have to use Humane’s web portal on an inferior device like a computer or a phone. Gross. Not a great start for the Pin, but now that I have done that, I should hopefully never ever have to use one of those ancient relics again.

It’s just one flashing green speck over here. I guess the laser ink display is already kind of messed up. Probably not a good sign for this technology, but you know what? This is a new thing—this whole laser ink display. So I will—Oh boy, Carter, time to start. What? What am I playing? Beyoncé and Dolly Parton? Don’t know how I started playing that. Guess that’s just a feature. If you make just the right gesture, it’ll start playing the newest Beyoncé song that exists.

Alright, let’s start off by trying a phone call on this. I’m going to try to call my wife Laura to tell her that I miss her. Call my wife. I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a contact for my wife. Okay, fair enough. It doesn’t know who my wife is, so I’ll just tell it. If I tell you who my wife is, will you remember? Your AI Pin can remember who your wife is if you provide the information. Excellent. So I told it my wife’s name is Laura. Please remember this. It’s very important to me. Updating memory. Noting that your wife is Laura.

AI Pin’s Inconsistent Performance

I wish people said that every time you told them something important. Updating memory. Yo, what’s up, dude? My name is Paul. Updating memory. Analyzing. Great, so now we’re both on the same page. My wife is Laura, and I want to call my wife. So now it will call Laura, right? Call my wife. Multiple matching contacts. Which one do you mean? Laura Fexslow or Claire? What? Claire? The girl I went to college with?

Unfortunately, I did have to go back onto my computer to figure this out. And amongst all the data stored within my portal, like my name being Neon Vortex and the tunes I’ve been rocking out to lately, was the answer. My wife’s name, according to the Pin, was Lore. It thinks my wife’s name is Lore. No, that’s simply not correct. So I went ahead and fixed it in the portal. You know, that’s what the portal’s there for. So I fixed it. I changed it, and now it’s going to work.

Call my wife. There are multiple matching contacts. Which one do you mean? Oh my God. Call Laura Fexslow. I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a contact for Laura Fexslow. How? How? Okay, so at this point, I don’t know what was wrong. It was just like straight up forgetting which contacts it had. It said it couldn’t call Laura because it didn’t have her contact. Then it said it couldn’t call Eddie because it didn’t have his contact.

Call Eddie Burback. I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a contact for Eddie Burback. Why not? And you might think, “Danny, maybe there was an error transferring the contacts. Maybe it really doesn’t have these contacts.” But I know it had Eddie’s contact. And do you know how I know? Because it could text Eddie.

Can you text Eddie Burback? What do you want the message to say? Okay. Alright. I’m still not sure if this is going to work, but finally, thank God, it’s letting me do something. Hey Eddie, it’s your… No, I’m not trying to play Cowboy Carter. Oh God, now it’s playing Metro Boomin. Stop.

Anyway, eventually I sent the text to Eddie. It worked. I didn’t have any way to know it worked because there’s no screen on this device. You can’t see what the message you sent said or anything, so I guess you just got to hope and pray it goes through and accurately transcribes what you said to it, which frankly, I am not confident in after the whole Lore debacle.

Okay, Eddie just texted my actual phone and said, “I know you made a video on the Pin and I’m positive this is you, but it still feels like a scam, LMAO. I’m too scared to text back to a random number claiming to be my friend.” Regardless of scaring my friend, the text went through. This was a huge confidence boost. Time to try calling my wife again. Call Laura.

What? What is this? Something has been recorded. Record your message after the tone. Oh, simply hang up or for delivery options, press the pound sign. Hang up. I don’t want to play like that. I don’t want to play Metro Boomin. Hang up. Am I still recording a message? Cancel. I’ve been on the phone with her for a minute. Hang up. I don’t want to play like that. It was some man being like, “I don’t want to play like that. I don’t want to play like that. I don’t want to play.” Hang up. Am I still recording a message?

Okay, well, yeah, I’d say that was a success. I’d seen a few demos online of Humane’s GPS navigation solution, and while it did seem kind of annoying to have to hold your hand up like this the entire time, it seemed pretty doable as long as they stuck to this and didn’t do anything crazy like, I don’t know, going in a completely different direction and making it borderline unusable.

Navigation Issues with AI Pin

So to test it for myself, I drove to a part of town I don’t know very well, about a mile away from the nearest Smoothie King, with hopes of the Pin guiding me to a delicious, delectable treat. Navigate to Smoothie King. Head north on South Colia Street towards East Gartner Road, turn right onto East Gartner Road, then left onto South Washington Street, follow Washington Street, and turn right onto East Chicago Avenue. It just gave me all of the directions at once. Oh, I was not ready for it. Am I supposed to have a notebook to write that down?

Also, sorry for the noise. If you live in Illinois or one of the surrounding states, you know it’s cicada season. It’s the year of the cicada, and they’re everywhere. One just landed on my shoe and then got pissed off that I moved. Eventually, I realized if I look at the laser display, it displays the directions, but not like it did in any of the demos. It just gives you a block of text with every single direction written down. If you’re in the shade, that is. If you’re in the sun, it gives you nothing. Can’t see anything.

I was very confused by this and thought surely this could not be right. What happened to all those demos? So just to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I asked it again, and this time I got an even stranger response. Directions to Smoothie King. For accurate and up-to-date directions, consider using a map service like Google Maps or a GPS navigation. What? Can you give me step-by-step walking instructions to the Smoothie King? For step-by-step walking directions, it’s best to use a navigation app like Google Maps for the most accurate and up-to-date route.

I thought this—I thought, but you had navigation instructions. What? So now not only was it forgetting things that it could do in the demo, it was also forgetting that it just moments earlier had given me step-by-step instructions. This thing was regressing at a rapid rate, and if I ever wanted to get to Smoothie King, I was just going to have to use the directions on my hand and go.

Okay, well, I guess I’m just going to use those written-out directions, which start with “Head south on this road, Columbia Street.” And I actually don’t know which way is south, so I guess I just have to use the sun to try to figure that out. So the sun is directly overhead. What does that mean?

Okay, while