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On Monday, Apple unveiled the iPhone 16, the first Apple phone built from scratch to work with artificial intelligence. Or as the Cupertino, Calif.-based company calls it, Apple Intelligence. Apple’s trademark has always been to seamlessly integrate its functions into a simple, user-friendly device. So now that we have AI in our pockets, what will happen to us? Quartz’s Weekend Brief asked some leading technologists and neuroscientists for their take on how pocket AI will change our lives, and what we need to watch out for.
Slow and steady...
The iPhone 16, and its iOS 18 operating system, are not a radical advance in technology, and few people expect it to immediately change the lives of consumers. What it’s doing is laying the groundwork for an enduring relationship, says Phil Libin, a founder of the OG organizing app Evernote. “Apple Intelligence is going for the smaller use cases that are less ambitious but more practical,” Libin said in an interview. He says it fits in with what Google co-founder Larry Page calls the toothbrush test. “You don’t think about the toothbrush much, but it’s part of your everyday life.”
Apple is hoping its AI phone will be adopted as a virtual personal assistant who knows its owner’s style, taste, habits, routines, consumption behavior, active hours, and even its health and emotions, to let it predict behavior and ease the tasks of everyday life.
Being one of the first out of the gate with a suite of AI functions may also give Apple a chance to regain its dominant position in consumer electronics. iPhone sales have fallen precipitously in the past couple years, largely because of the incremental change in design. iPhone revenue in the second quarter was $39.30 billion, down 23.5% from $51.3 billion a year earlier.
“Whoever is the first to figure out a user-friendly and stylish AI that can do all of the above may not just dominate a specific market, but could become a massive dominating force that makes others obsolete,” said Kaveh Vahdat, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based RiseAngle, a generative AI game creation company that makes games for smartphones. “Apple and all other giants know this, and it’s only natural for them to want to be the first.”
However, Apple’s limited roll out of AI features curbs its utility, says Konstantin Klyagin, the founder of Ukraine-based software testing agency Redwerk. He says Apple Intelligence is far from being a game changer. Beta testing carried out by his firm, he said, showed Apple AI is “an intelligent assistant, rather than a revolutionary technology.”
That’s probably a good thing, says Evernote’s Libin, whose latest company is an AI-powered app.
“Low-stakes high utility: That’s a very smart move on Apple’s part,” said Libin. “It’s not so bad if it gets it wrong, but you wind up using it so often that it’s helpful. When it works and works very often, it helps.”
On the edge
The AI phone’s reliance on what is known as edge computing — processing data on site (or in your phone), not on a cloud-based server — is likely to help reassure users their data is safe. Large language models may help train it initially, but once you buy an AI-enabled iPhone, your data is its only language model. That offers a greater degree of privacy — your data isn’t shared with others, even anonymously. But that also requires you to trust Apple with your privacy, when your iPhone is home to all your personal secrets.
Dumb and dumber vs. smart and smarter
What’s the purpose of having AI in your pocket? To make better memes? To schedule your appointments for you?
“Do we end up dumbed down because it’s in our hands?” asked Libin. Probably not, he says, but don’t think we’ll all be geniuses either because of it. His AI-driven companies have all been built on incrementally expanding what the technology can do.
“The AI shouldn’t really stand for artificial,” he adds. “It should stand for augmented. You don’t want to make the machine smarter than the person, you want to make man plus machine smarter.”
Are our brains ready for this?
Putting a well-designed AI tool into consumers’ hands is a “threshold moment” for AI, says Dr. A.K. Pradeep, a Berkley-trained neuroscientist and founder of sensoriAI, a firm that uses neuroscience and AI to develop marketing campaigns and consumer products.
“It allows consumers to access AI, to play with it, to have fun with it and to start to derive a little bit of value from it,” he said. As we become more comfortable with tools like AI found in the iPhone 16, says Pradeep, “we are going to become super empowered,” able to take vague ideas and strong desires and with the help of AI make them real, whether that’s creating an image or a love poem or a new business, or simply eliminating the drudge work that clutters our daily lives.
But it may take some time to get there.
“Our brains are not ready, because we are still trying to imagine what’s possible,” says Anthony Goonetilleke, group president for technology and head of strategy at Amdocs, a global firm that builds tech platforms for large companies. He’s spent a lot of time looking at how AI can be integrated into workflows and the daily life of his clients.
His biggest concern is that the more time we spend with AI, the more time AI spends with us. With edge-computing AI using a language model based solely on an iPhone’s user, he says, “I can train a model to think like you, based on the data I have collected about how you think.” He equates that process with stealing a user’s “personal IP,” or intellectual property. What’s the point of being a successful entertainer, for instance, if an AI trained on you can do everything that you would do?
“I could be having a conversation with an avatar, and I might not know that, and that to me is problematic, because AI is melting into our lives without intention,” said Goonetilleke.
For Goonetilleke, it’s imperative that government and industry come together quickly to set rules about the use of AI. “It’s not about AI taking control of the world,” he says, “it’s about AI taking over without me knowing.”
That’s a view echoed by Lars Nyman, chief marketing officer of CUDO Compute, a cloud computing platform for AI users. “There’s a very real risk that AI goes from auto completing our thoughts, to replacing them,” he said in an email. “The allure of convenience could easily entrap us within an echo chamber of trite, regurgitated digital monotony.”
“We as a species, as a set of thinking, loving, feeling people are going to somehow find a way to integrate this powerful tool and not lose track of our authenticity, of our humanity,” said Pradeep. “That will be our enduring challenge.”
Thanks for reading, and turn off your phone. You may even feel smarter.
— Peter Green, Weekend Brief writer