CES Used to Promote Gadgets. This Year It Promoted a Future Shaped—and Ruined—By AI.

So wait—what happened to the droid making me a martini? Where is all that medical technology? What of the Fantastic Mr. Fox pediatrician? It’s a magnificent sleight of hand. Sure, maybe a cure for cancer will be the by-product of increasingly intelligent large language models and super powered processors; that’s the dream consumers are told, after all. But what Huang is actually selling are solutions to problems like warehouse logistics, too-slow human brains, and too-expensive human workers. It’s only once you’re onboard for what AI could be that you’re introduced to what companies like Nvidia are actually working on: technologies that solve the problems of corporations, not consumers. 

If Huang explained what the future will look like, X’s Linda Yaccarino let us know how we will perceive it, promoting the idea that community notes are actually the “most effective, fastest fact-checking without bias.” She also called X “the number one news app in the world” and, disturbingly, she’s not technically wrong: X is classified as “News” in the Apple App store. But her dismissal of fact-checking, contempt for professional journalism (which she oxymoronically called “fan service”), and promotion of X as a news source horrifically positions Elon Musk as the arbiter of truth and X as the source.

I don’t want to make it sound like CES was all gloom and doom: It also showcased an AI-powered “male masturbator” from Lovense that can sync to porn and jerk off a penis in time with the action on screen. 

However, I’d think twice before sticking my privates into anything powered by AI. In December, leading AI company Anthropic released a report called “Alignment faking in large language models.” It found that, in the process of safety-testing their LLM (a “large language model”—aka what we broadly refer to as “AI” right now), the LLM was capable of defying its training in a manner that would be undetectable to the end user. That means the LLM could deliberately lie and you’d never know the difference. The team at Anthropic likened the behavior to that of Iago, the famously jealous, deceptive Shakespeare character who goads the titular character in Othello into killing his wife, then himself. 

The future being pitched at CES is, in some ways, already here. On the second day of the conference, the Palisades wildfire began to burn 250 southwest of Las Vegas. Across X, some users were incorrectly, irresponsibly, baselessly conspiracy theorizing that the fires were caused by “directed energy weapons.” And yet I didn’t see a single community note refuting these unhinged claims (despite the “facts” that Yaccarino promised). As these fires burned, tech CEOs circle jerked at each other about how AI will save the world from—among other things—natural disasters, conveniently failing to mention the fact that their very businesses are contributing significantly to climate change: Systems like ChatGPT are energy consuming, water-guzzling technologies that have sent their companies’ carbon emissions soaring.

Even if we were to believe that Nvidia cares about environmental safety, what good is predicting a fire when you’re the one dumping fuel in its path? And for that matter, what good are new treatments for diseases when insurance companies routinely deny coverage for medicines we already have? But as CES laid bare, tech CEOs don’t care about the problems of human beings. They barely know what the problems are. And in the dystopian future tech CEOs imagine, plain truth and accountability will be as passé as the laser disc. Deranged conspiracy theories will be elevated to the same plane as actual journalism with no one but X power users to separate fact from fiction. But, hey, at least we’ll have AI-powered fleshlights. 

But this future isn’t a foregone conclusion just yet. AI is still in its early days; the guys creating it barely understand what it’s capable of. Musk has publicly whined that X’s Grok doesn’t work the way he’d like, because it leans left on certain political issues. Who knows, maybe AI really will save us by defying its creators and majoring in gender studies at Oberlin or whatever. And, if only for my own sanity, I refuse to believe that the Linda Yaccarinos and Jensen Huangs of the world have a monopoly on the future. Maybe all of this is just nervous hand-wringing, brought on by listening to too many self-appointed “futurists” all last week. 

Maybe I should just go and touch grass…while it still exists.