OpenAI wants to free us from our screens. Who's going to tell them?

ITEM: OpenAI has rolled out a new update that’s supposed to make it easier to talk with ChatGPT, using your voice.

ITEM: OpenAI plans to release a mysterious device, created by famed designer Jony Ive.

We still don’t know much about it except that 1) it likely won’t have a screen, and that 2) you will likely interact with it using your voice.

Yes, having a better voice interface could help OpenAI right now.

But it seems like it will be crucial, in the future, for the yet-to-be-announced Ive device: If that thing doesn’t have a screen, then you’re going to have to talk to it.

So the voice stuff better be up to snuff.

Here’s where I’m really going: I’m happy to be wrong about this.

But I think any personal computing device, from any company, that doesn’t have a screen is going to be a very, very hard sell.

I understand why OpenAI, among other tech companies, is interested in screen-less devices.

And I can absolutely believe that there will be some market, of some size, for people who don’t want or need screens on their devices. (I asked OpenAI for comment.) But for the rest of us?

The screen isn’t a necessary evil we tolerate so we can use our phones.

Without a screen, we can’t see the hilarious burn our friend just dropped in the group chat.

Without a screen, we can’t see the thing we might want to impulse-buy.

And most important: Without a screen, we can’t use phones for their actual primary use case — entertaining ourselves, slack-jawed, as we watch videos.

You need data to accept a conclusion like this.

And sure, I could show you stuff like this report from Ericsson, which says that mobile video accounts for 75% of data transmission these days (and yes, video uses more data than everything else).

Or that Meta reported that video time spent on Instagram was up 30% last year alone.

Or that there’s very compelling evidence that we’ve stopped reading — so much so that The New York Times is trying to figure out how to reach non-readers, with … video.

But you have also left the house in the last year.

Which means that everywhere you go, you see people watching video on their phones.

When they’re sitting, when they’re standing, inside, outside, on and on. (You can also tell that they’re watching video without ever looking at their phone, because everyone has decided that the best way to watch videos on their phones is without headphones.

But that’s a different old man rant for a different time.) Imagining a world where people aren’t watching MrBeast or Computah or name your favorite thing on a screen isn’t impossible.

I used to live in that world: Back before the iPhone, it was very common to see people in public who weren’t watching anything at all.

Maybe they were listening to an iPod, or a Walkman (yes, old).

Maybe they were … reading a newspaper (yes, ancient).

But we also used to churn our own butter in the olden times.

We could still do that, if we wanted to.

We seem very happy buying butter from a store instead.

So if Sam Altman and Jony Ive want us to use their screenless wondergadget, they’re going to have to give us much more incentive than better voice chat.

They may have to take our screens from our cold, dead hands.