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Vox
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
What we learned the last time we put AI in a Barbie
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. The first big Christmas gift I remember getting was an animatronic bear named Teddy Ruxpin. Thanks to a cassette tape hidden in his belly, he could talk, his eyes and mouth moving in a famously creepy way. Later that winter, when I was sick with a fever, I hallucinated that the toy came alive and attacked me. I never saw Teddy again after that. These days, toys can do a lot more than tell pre-recorded stories. So-called smart toys, many of which are internet-connected, are a $20 billion business, and increasingly, they're artificially intelligent. Mattel and OpenAI announced a partnership last week to 'bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety.' They're planning to announce their first product later this year. It's unclear what this might entail: maybe it's Barbies that can gossip with you or a self-driving Hot Wheels or something we haven't even dreamed up yet. All of this makes me nervous as a young parent. I already knew that generative AI was invading classrooms and filling the internet with slop, but I wasn't expecting it to take over the toy aisle so soon. After all, we're already struggling to figure out how to manage our kids' relationship with the technology in their lives, from screen time to the uncanny videos made to trick YouTube's algorithm. As it seeps further into our society, a growing number of people are using AI without even realizing it. So you can't blame me for being anxious about how children might encounter the technology in unexpected ways. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. AI-powered toys are not as new as you might think. They're not even new for Mattel. A decade ago, the toy giant released Hello Barbie, an internet-connected doll that listened to kids and used AI to respond (think Siri, not ChatGPT). It was essentially the same concept as Teddy Ruxpin except with a lot of digital vulnerabilities. Naturally, security researchers took notice and hacked Hello Barbie, revealing that bad actors could steal personal information or eavesdrop on conversations children were having with the doll. Mattel discontinued the doll in 2017. Hello Barbie later made an appearance in the Barbie movie alongside other poor toy choices like Sugar Daddy Ken and Pregnant Midge. Despite this cautionary tale, companies keep trying to make talking AI toys a thing. One more recent example comes from the mind of Grimes, of all people. Inspired by the son she shares with Elon Musk, the musician teamed up with a company called Curio to create a stuffed rocket ship named Grok. The embodied chatbot is supposed to learn about whomever is playing with it and become a personalized companion. In real life, Grok is frustratingly dumb, according to Katie Arnold-Ratliff, a mom and writer who chronicled her son's experience with the toy in New York magazine last year. 'What captures the hearts and minds of young children is often what they create for themselves with the inanimate artifacts.' 'When it started remembering things about my kid, and speaking back to him, he was amazed,' Arnold-Ratliff told me this week. 'That awe very quickly dissipated once it was like, why are you talking about this completely unrelated thing.' Grok is still somewhere in their house, she said, but it has been turned off for quite some time. It turns out Arnold-Ratliff's son is more interested in inanimate objects that he can make come alive with his imagination. Sure, he'll play Mario on his Nintendo Switch for long stretches of time, but afterward, he'll draw his own worlds on paper. He'll even create digital versions of new levels on Super Mario Maker but get frustrated when the software can't keep up with his imagination. This is a miraculous paradox when it comes to kids and certain tech-powered toys. Although an adult might think that, for instance, AI could prompt kids to think about play in new ways or become an innovative new imaginary friend, kids tend to prefer imagining on their own terms. That's according to Naomi Aguiar, PhD, a researcher at Oregon State University who studies how children form relationships with AI chatbots. 'There's nothing wrong with children's imaginations. They work fine,' Aguiar said. 'What captures the hearts and minds of young children is often what they create for themselves with the inanimate artifacts.' Aguiar did concede that AI can be a powerful educational tool for kids, especially for those who don't have access to resources or who may be on the spectrum. 'If we focus on solutions to specific problems and train the models to do that, it could open up a lot of opportunities,' she told me. Putting AI in a Barbie, however, is not solving a particular problem. None of this means that I'm allergic to the concept of tech-centric toys for kids. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ahead of the Mattel-OpenAI announcement, I'd started researching toys my kid might like that incorporated some technology — enough to make them especially interesting and engaging — but stopped short of triggering dystopian nightmares. Much to my surprise, what I found was something of a mashup between completely inanimate objects and that terrifying Teddy Ruxpin. One of these toys is called a Toniebox, a screen-free audio player with little figurines called Tonies that you put atop the box to unlock content — namely songs, stories, and so forth. Licenses abound, so you can buy a Tonie that corresponds with pretty much any popular kids character, like Disney princesses or Paddington Bear. There are also so-called Creative Tonies that allow you to upload your own audio. For instance, you could ostensibly have a stand-in for a grandparent to enable story time, even if Grandma and Grandpa are not physically there. The whole experience is mediated with an app that the kid never needs to see. There's also the Yoto Player and the Yoto Mini, which are similar to the Toniebox but use cards instead of figurines and have a very low-resolution display that can show a clock or a pixelated character. Because it has that display, kids can also create custom icons to show up when they record their own content onto a card. Yoto has been beta-testing an AI-powered story generator, which is designed for parents to create custom stories for their kids. If those audio players are geared toward story time, a company called Nex makes a video game console for playtime. It's called Nex Playground, and kids use their movements to control it. This happens thanks to a camera equipped with machine-learning capabilities to recognize your movements and expressions. So imagine playing Wii Sports, but instead of throwing the Nintendo controller through your TV screen when you're trying to bowl, you make the bowling motion to play the game. Nex makes most of its games in-house, and all of the computation needed for its gameplay happens on the device itself. That means there's no data being collected or sent to the cloud. Once you download a game, you don't even have to be online to play it. 'We envision toys that can just grow in a way where they become a new way to interact with technology for kids and evolve into something that's much deeper, much more meaningful for families,' David Lee, CEO of Nex, said when I asked him about the future of toys. It will be a few more years before I have to worry about my kid's interactions with a video game console, much less an AI-powered Barbie — and certainly not Teddy Ruxpin. But she loves her Toniebox. She talks to the figurines and lines them up alongside each other, like a little posse. I have no idea what she's imagining them saying back. In a way, that's the point.
Vox
12-06-2025
- Vox
Your iPhone is about to get uglier
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. Once a decade, Apple does something that mobilizes its entire userbase in a fit of pixelated rage: It redesigns its software and debuts that new design. The updated look is called Liquid Glass, and it's predictably controversial. 'What's the use of this cool new Liquid Glass design if you can't read or see anything clearly?' a tech content creator wondered, referring to the translucent backgrounds that dominate the glassy new interface. 'Am I the only one who thinks Apple's new Liquid Glass design is bullshit?' asked a startup CEO. 'Every day we stray farther off Steve's light,' a designer posted. First things first, this panic is only temporary. While it looked very polished onstage at Apple's WWDC developer conference this week, the final versions are not set in stone. The new operating systems for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Watch will now enter a beta-testing phase that will last at least three months, and after that, the design will get tweaked constantly thereafter. This is what happened 10 years ago when Apple rolled out its last major redesign. People, being creatures of comfort, tend to hate redesigns of anything. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'Ultimately, real users are not that worried about what the tech press says about where Apple is with AI,' said Tom Mainelli, head of device and consumer research at the market intelligence firm IDC. 'They just want features that work.' Apple Intelligence, in its current form, does not work well. One of the first features that launched were notifications summarized by AI, which are sometimes nonsensical. Another tool, called Clean Up, which uses AI to remove unwanted objects from photos initially got mixed reviews. These features have gotten better over time, and if you don't want to use them, Apple makes it really easy to just turn off Apple Intelligence altogether. Meanwhile, the revamped, 'more personalized' Siri that was supposed to be the centerpiece of Apple Intelligence was never released. After months of delays and incremental updates, Apple admitted in March that the Siri features it showed off at last year's WWDC — things like the ability to connect data across your apps, take actions on your behalf, and even help you remember people's names — weren't going to be ready for a while. It's unclear, however, how much any of this matters to the average iPhone user. Some litigious consumers are expressing their displeasure rather forcefully. Apple launched a massive marketing campaign around Apple Intelligence, including some commercials that highlighted a more advanced Siri. That name-reminder magic trick showed up in an ad starring the Last of Us actor Bella Ramsey and was later cited in a class action lawsuit that accused Apple of false advertising. Apple is now facing three of these lawsuits. The plaintiffs broadly argue that they bought new Apple devices in order to enjoy the Apple Intelligence tools (only the latest devices support the new software) and ended up paying an 'unlawful premium' for something that didn't exist. Apple ended up pulling that Ramsey ad and added disclaimers about the new Siri features to its website. In a sign that Apple is feeling the heat, its executives are also now defending their decision to hold off on releasing more AI features more quickly. 'This stuff takes hard work, but we do see AI as a long-term transformational wave as one that's going to affect our industry and of course our society for decades to come,' Apple software chief Craig Federighi told the Wall Street Journal this week. 'There's no need to rush out with the wrong features and the wrong product just to be first.' Imagine you spilled water on your iPhone screen, and you'll have an idea of what Liquid Glass looks like. Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images The new Siri is taking so long, Federighi said, because Apple had to rebuild Siri's architecture with an eye toward privacy. Google, meanwhile, has few hang-ups about enlisting its massive cloud computing infrastructure to power the latest version of Gemini, the AI assistant that's baked into Android. For any Apple users sick of waiting for better AI features — and again, it's not clear how many of them there are — Google is the clear alternative. Google is not being shy about broadcasting its AI ambitions, either. While Apple barely mentioned AI at its developer's conference, Google made AI the star of its own conference in May. The company even showed off a prototype that could use your phone's camera and microphones to know what's happening around you at all times and do tasks on your behalf. If Siri is slightly helpless, Google's AI might be too powerful in the future. As it has done with everything from the iPod to the Vision Pro headset, Apple famously waits to see what everyone else does with a new technology before making its move. If Apple isn't the first company to make something, it wants to make the best version of it. 'There is a risk for Apple that if they are too slow or too deliberate, they could lose some of the folks that want to live on the bleeding edge,' Mainelli said, 'but I think the vast majority of Apple customers just want them to get it right.' It's actually surprising that Apple has even announced anything AI-related at all given how chaotic the industry still is. While Google looks comparatively put together, other tech giants keep scrambling to figure out how they fit into a new AI-powered world. Meta is reportedly investing billions in a new 'superintelligence' lab as it reorganizes its AI efforts, which have so far yielded mixed results. Amazon is struggling to release its new Alexa+ AI assistant. Even OpenAI is being cagey about its next move after acquiring a startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, who is secretly working on making AI 'companions' for people to carry around with them. For now, Apple devices can be a sort of safe haven from over-experimentation with AI in a digital landscape where the new technology feels like it's encroaching everywhere. You can always use AI apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity or even Google Gemini on an iPhone or a Mac. But your experience doesn't have to revolve around half-formed AI tools. As Federighi, the Apple executive, told the Wall Street Journal, Apple introduced the internet to millions of its users, but it didn't do it by building a search engine. Apple devices can be a sort of safe haven from over-experimentation with AI in a digital landscape where the new technology feels like it's encroaching everywhere. 'Apple made the internet accessible in a lot of ways — more than anyone,' Federighi said. 'That didn't mean every experience that you take on was going to happen inside of Apple.' In the same interview, Federighi made it clear that Apple is charging ahead with the development of its own AI models and that the company wants the new technology to be deeply integrated into its devices. But if you're looking for a generally AI-free way to enjoy your iPhone, you can do so for another year. You cannot, however, escape Liquid Glass. Love it or hate it, the new look coming to all of the latest Apple devices in the fall.
Vox
02-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
I covered my body in health trackers for 6 months. It ruined my life.
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. It's never good when an alarm surprises you in the middle of the night. I was recently on vacation with my family, and a weird beeping woke everyone up around 2 am. My wife thought it was a carbon monoxide detector. I thought it might be the baby monitor. It was actually a signal from a little sensor on the back of my arm prompting an app on my phone to go berserk. My blood sugar was low, and my fitness program was in jeopardy. A few months ago, I started tracking everything I could about my health. In the dark bedroom of that vacation house, I was wearing smart rings on both hands and a smartwatch on my wrist. On my other wrist was a band that basically does the same thing as the smartwatch but without a screen. I'd been weighing myself with a body scanner and taking my blood pressure with a wireless cuff for weeks. All this tech promised to tell me how well my body was working, but as I immersed myself in the alluring, sometimes dystopian future of health tracking, things got weird. Health trackers started as a way to keep a record of straightforward metrics, like the number of steps you take in a day; the industry has since matured into gadgets that promise to glean deeper insights into the essential functioning of your biological systems. Many of these new trackers take the data they collect and churn out a variety of scores — recovery scores, sleep scores, attention scores — to understand your body's performance and give you benchmarks to chase. My sharpening sense of mortality ultimately led me to explore the frontiers of health tracking to investigate my aches and strains — and maybe help me live healthier and longer. The sensor on my arm was a continuous glucose monitor, or CGM, which is a wearable device that measures blood sugar. This kind of biosensor has long been a lifesaving tool for diabetic patients, but tech companies are increasingly marketing them to everyone in the name of 'metabolic health.' One such company, Levels, was co-founded by Casey Means, a wellness influencer who is a central figure in the Make America Healthy Again movement and now the United States surgeon general nominee. I am not diabetic. I'm also not an athlete, although I once was. I'm a tech journalist who, at the beginning of this year, started to feel quite old. Things that used to not hurt started hurting, and I felt tired constantly. Diabetes and heart disease, among the most prevalent chronic diseases in the United States, also run in my family, which made it seem wise to keep a closer eye on risk factors like my blood pressure and cholesterol. My sharpening sense of mortality ultimately led me to explore the frontiers of health tracking to investigate my aches and strains — and maybe help me live healthier and longer. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. What I can tell you is that over the course of my months-long experiment, covering my body with sensors and drowning my attention with fitness scores did occasionally make me feel better — when it didn't make me feel worse. Fitness trackers, as we understand them, have been around since the 1960s, when a Japanese company hoped to capitalize on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by selling a pedometer called the Manpo-Kei — 'manpo' means 10,000 steps in Japanese. The science behind that number has always been iffy, but the figure went mainstream in 2009, when the original Fitbit hit the market in the form of a thumb-size accelerometer that clipped onto your clothing. Step-counting was only the beginning. In the early 2010s, tech companies flooded the market with fitness trackers. Apple released its health app in 2014 and then released the first Apple Watch the following year. That device used LED lights to measure your pulse, and eventually, Apple added sensors for your body temperature and electrodes to record electrocardiograms and track blood oxygen levels. Fitness-tracking became health tracking. The tracking devices themselves still performed the same basic measurements, but in the coming years, all of that data would get pumped through various algorithms to draw conclusions about your overall health. In theory, health-tracking software could spot — or even prevent — disease. The amount of data that all of these devices collect is massive and extremely personal. 'For that to work, you have to have the largest data set on a person possible,' said Victoria Song, who covers wearables for The Verge. 'But it's pretty invasive, if you really think about it.' The amount of data all of these devices collect is massive and extremely personal. Many devices need to know your age, height, and weight, not to mention where you are and how you're moving at all times — which leads to heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen readings. If you add a glucose monitor in the mix, health trackers can now get moment-to-moment updates about what's happening in the fluid between your cells. Safeguarding the sensitive health information these devices collect is a whole other challenge. The data is typically stored in the cloud. The privacy policies for these companies vary, but suffice it to say, it's possible that data from your health tracker, probably anonymized, ends up in the hands of an advertiser. There have also been major data breaches involving health-tracking companies, including Fitbit. Nonetheless, about 30 percent of Americans in one survey said they wear these kinds of health trackers, and there's evidence that the tech can be good for you. In 2022, The Lancet published a systematic review that looked at dozens of studies involving over 160,000 participants of all ages and found that those wearing fitness trackers walked 40 more minutes per day — or about 1,800 steps — on average. A review into the mental health benefits of wearables published in 2024 found some research showing that wearables have a positive effect on well-being, but overall determined that the issue was understudied. Health trackers give us the sense that we might just be able to exert control over the uncontrollable — our very mortality — or to at least momentarily allay our fears about it. People must think wearables are helpful because they keep buying them. Perhaps that's no surprise given levels of chronic illness remain stubbornly high in the United States and a wellness industry has primed consumers to buy their way to better physical and mental health. The market for these devices includes everyone from fitness obsessives looking to optimize their performance in the gym to tech bros toying with the idea of living forever to anxious dads, like me. Health trackers give us the sense that we might just be able to exert control over the uncontrollable — our very mortality — or to at least momentarily allay our fears about it. And the industry keeps coming up with new things to sell us. 'We have so much information about everything all the time,' Thea Gallagher, a clinical psychologist at NYU Langone Health, told me recently. 'So many of us, probably all of us, feel like this is going to be an iterative process for the rest of our life: navigating our relationship with the tech.' The most popular wearable has been the Apple Watch since its release, but in our screen-saturated world, many people are turning to devices that lack displays and buzzing notifications. That includes the Oura ring, which discreetly measures your heart rate, body temperature, and movement from a single finger, and the Whoop band, which does the same thing from your wrist. Although their lack of screens makes these devices theoretically easier to ignore, the Oura and Whoop apps are essentially endless feeds of your health data. When you log on in the morning, Oura produces a 'Readiness Score,' which it says is a 'holistic picture of your health' that combines several signals, including resting heart rate and body temperature, into what feels like a grade for the day. Whoop gives you a similarly confusing 'Recovery' percentage. If I want to improve those scores, Oura, Whoop, and a growing number of their competitors now have AI-powered coaches built into their apps to nudge your behavior. But it's not always clear what exactly those nudges hope to accomplish. 'There's not a lot of time and effort spent on figuring out what is the actual question,' said Gary Wolf, founder of Quantified Self, a community of people who have been tracking their health metrics since the mid-2000s, and also a tech journalist. 'It's kind of obvious why people come through these tools without learning anything.' In theory, your doctor could look at a readout of all your wearable data to get a clearer picture of your health. But in reality, few patients even share this data with their doctors, and many physicians have said it isn't very helpful. Heart-rate variability, a measure of the change in time between your heartbeats, is one of the most critical metrics used in the scoring algorithms, but there's some debate over how accurately wearables can measure it. There's also just too much data, and it's hard to isolate the signal from the noise. 'Just seeing the data can be anxiety-inducing,' said Tanzeem Choudhury, a professor of integrated health and technology at Cornell Tech. 'You have all this information that you don't know what to do with.' In other words, if you think of your overall health as an equation (which, to be clear, it is not), the types of variables a watch or a ring can collect are limited to the right side of the equal sign. You're doing your thing, and then things like breathing patterns, heart rate, and body temperature are all the end result. What happens on the left side of that equation — what's causing all of these fluctuations — is much harder to figure out. Health trackers ultimately put the onus on the user to decide what changes to make to get their desired results. And when it comes to smartwatches, smart rings, and smart bands, the recommendations tend to be pretty simple: Move more or sleep more. These devices know the rhythms of your body, but they can't really know what's happening internally. The first time I installed a continuous glucose monitor into my arm, I expected it to hurt. The coin-size biosensors use a spring-loaded plunger of sorts that dips a needle into your skin and leaves a tiny piece of filament behind that measures your blood glucose. The process is surprisingly painless. Once installed, the biosensor syncs to an app that shows you a real-time visualization of your blood sugar. It looks a little bit like a roller-coaster with spikes for high-glucose periods after eating and stable stretches. This helps people with diabetes manage their condition, but a growing number of companies and influencers say these biosensors can help anyone gain insight into their metabolic health. Metabolic health is the latest buzz phrase not only in the health-tracking industry but among adherents of the Make America Healthy Again movement. What I didn't know when I started receiving real-time and sometimes alarming updates about my own blood sugar was that metabolic health is the latest buzz phrase not only in the health-tracking industry but among adherents of the Make America Healthy Again movement. While the concept of metabolic disorders, which include conditions like diabetes or heart disease, has evolved over the past century, 'metabolic health' only started showing up in medical literature in the last decade or so. Someone is considered metabolically healthy if a certain set of their biomarkers — namely blood glucose levels, cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure — are within the desired range. Related How America went MAHA Historically, your doctor checked these levels when you got your annual bloodwork done and that was enough to give most people peace of mind about their health — particularly their risk for heart disease and diabetes. But in recent years, pharmaceutical companies like Abbott and Dexcom have begun to market over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors to everyone. Oura recently launched a glucose-tracking program of its own that uses Dexcom's Stelo biosensors. Abbott has its own app. Then there's Levels, the metabolic health company co-founded by Means, President Donald Trump's pick for US surgeon general, with the mission to 'bring biowearables into the mainstream.' Means, a Stanford-trained physician and wellness influencer, is also the co-author of Good Energy, a bestselling book that bills itself as 'the simple answer to achieving incredible health,' which she wrote with her brother, Calley Means, a former lobbyist and current White House adviser on health policy. The book operates on the claim that every chronic disease stems from metabolic dysfunction, or 'bad energy,' and the American health care system, which Calley Means calls a 'sick-care system,' is profiting from treating the symptoms. 'You are the primary person in charge of understanding your body,' Casey Means says on her website. 'You may have been indoctrinated to think you're not capable of understanding your body or your lab tests, but this stops here.' That philosophy — and the philosophy undergirding health tracking in general — fits into MAHA's ethos — that good health is your personal responsibility and can be engineered by doing all the right things. Other prominent figures in the MAHA movement have been raising the alarm about metabolic health, too, and touting high-tech health tracking as a solution. Robert Lustig, professor emeritus of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF who is an adviser and early investor in Levels, signed an open letter endorsing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services. So did Mark Hyman, the co-founder of the membership-based concierge lab test provider Function Health who's pushed Levels to his followers. Perhaps the most influential of the health-tracking evangelists, however, is Marty Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. In his Senate confirmation hearing in March, Makary, a pancreatic surgeon from Johns Hopkins, talked quite a bit about the promise of health trackers in the midst of America's chronic disease epidemic. Makary said we have a 'generational opportunity to usher in radical transparency' and to 'help people take care of their own health.' 'We don't just want to limit continuous glucose monitoring to people with diabetes. We want to prevent diabetes,' Makary told senators. 'Why are we holding these tools to help people empower them with knowledge about their health until after they're sick?' Regardless of the recent buzz around metabolic health in the wellness community, the medical community does not seem convinced that glucose monitors are useful for people without diabetes. Because there's not much research into tracking blood sugar in healthy people, 'we won't know whether the cost and time it takes to implant one of these systems is accomplishing anything or is just the latest health monitoring fad wasting effort and money,' according to Harvard Medical School associate professor Robert Shmerling. I'd shovel nuts into my mouth before breakfast, skip lunch to avoid stressful push alerts, and once I ate a mixing bowl full of romaine lettuce to feel better about a single slice of pizza. I tested several glucose-monitoring apps — including Levels, Lingo, Oura — over the course of a few months, and the negative effects of watching my blood sugar levels were almost immediately obvious to me. Within a week of wearing a glucose monitor, I started to notice some borderline disordered behavior. The Levels app sent me push alerts when my blood sugar spiked, which happened about five times a day, and each notification felt like a zap of anxiety. My morning bowl of cereal sent my blood glucose off the charts. My tuna sandwich at lunch did it again. A beer at happy hour? Forget it, the app made me think I was dying. So I started eating weird. I'd shovel nuts into my mouth before breakfast, skip lunch to avoid stressful push alerts, and once I ate a mixing bowl full of romaine lettuce to feel better about a single slice of pizza. My wife drew the line when I started taking pictures of my meals, so that some app's AI could analyze the nutrients in them. Glucose spikes after a meal are extremely normal. This is your body converting food into energy, or sugar, and then releasing insulin to instruct your cells to consume that energy. Over time, a pattern of large, prolonged spikes can lower your insulin resistance and raise your risk for Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Some research indicates that continuous glucose monitors could be a helpful tool for the early detection of prediabetes in high risk patients, but again, there is little evidence that healthy people benefit from using the technology. At a certain point, I wasn't thinking about my long-term health or sanity. I definitely wasn't thinking about the future of the American health care system. I was just trying to get a good score in the app and reduce the number of anxiety zaps. I spend a lot of time thinking about how technology makes our lives better — and worse. I've wondered the same about the American health care system, as I've gotten older and more involved in the health care decisions of my parents, kids, and myself. It's not a great comparison. After all, there is no Hippocratic oath for tech companies. In the six months I spent hooked up to every health tracker I could find, feeding my morbid curiosity, I drove myself slightly crazy. Each hit of dopamine I enjoyed by getting good scores on a health-tracking app was offset by long periods of self-doubt that came from not fully understanding how to make sense of the torrent of data without my doctor's help. I also became obsessive — checking the apps was the first thing I did in the morning and started occupying hours of my day. That's the contradiction embedded in this cutting-edge technology: It can often lead to panic rather than peace of mind. 'There's something called orthorexia, where being perfectionistically healthy can just take over your life,' Gallagher, the NYU psychologist, explained. 'You can get really rigid, maybe with what you eat and how you do things, when we typically find rigidity is not sustainable for most people.' That's the contradiction embedded in this cutting-edge technology: It can often lead to panic rather than peace of mind. I decided to take off my last biosensor as spring was turning to summer and felt a weight lifted. I put away the Whoop band, which is explicitly designed to be worn 24/7, so much so that the newest model comes with a wearable charger so that you don't have to take it off. The only thing that I kept wearing was the Oura ring when I slept. As a tired young parent, getting to see a breakdown of my sleep data somehow made me feel more in control. There was, it appeared, the right amount of data to make me feel better. But what if, instead of too much data about my body, I had almost nothing. That's the case for many people in the United States. If you're lucky enough to have regular access to health care — over 100 million Americans do not — you might get one annual visit with a primary care doctor. That might include one check of your vitals, including your blood pressure and resting heart rate. Basic bloodwork would tell me about my blood sugar and cholesterol. Your doctor might prescribe medication, like a statin, if those numbers are out of whack. This is an optimistic estimate of what health care currently looks like in America, where primary care is in crisis and many patients feel lucky to get 15 minutes of face time once a year or pay high prices to see someone right away at an urgent care center. This must be a factor in the rising popularity of wearables, such as the Oura ring and Apple Watch, as well as new health-tracking services, like Levels and Lingo. That and the simple fact that Americans love independence and immediacy. Perhaps in the absence of available professional medical advice and guidance, we're turning to these gadgets for quick and constant reassurance. Combined with googling symptoms or closely following wellness influencers, it almost feels like we're better off taking our health into our own hands. But health tracking in its current form is not a science or even an art. It's certainly not the near future of the American health care system, as some MAHA followers might make you believe. Health tracking, at its core, is a self-driven experiment in better living for those who can afford these products and have the time to spare to comb through their own data. In some ways, it's just an expensive hobby. Like running or perfecting your smoothie recipes, it can be good for you. Wearing a smart ring or a glucose monitor alone won't make you feel better.
Vox
29-05-2025
- Business
- Vox
What is Google even for anymore?
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. Somewhere between asking Google's new advanced AI to explain, in detail, how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and using Google's new AI moviemaking tool to create cartoons of my 4-pound Chihuahua fighting crime, I realized something. Either Google is having a midlife crisis or I am. It could be both. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I've spent the past week tinkering with Google's new AI tools, and I can confidently say the company is somewhere between crisis and glory. It may take years before we know which path wins. Google has dominated not only the way we use the web but also the web's very existence for the last 15 years, mainly through its search and advertising divisions. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. It almost certainly won't be by typing keywords into a search engine. To find something online today, you typically type some keywords into Google, pick a blue link that you think has the information you're after, and click. Companies bid on search terms in order to get their ads in front of people browsing the web, powering Google's multibillion-dollar advertising business. Your click helps publishers, including Vox, make money from ads they host on their sites, many of which Google manages. Google is dominant enough that two federal judges recently ruled that it's operating as an illegal monopoly, and the company is currently waiting to see if it will be broken up. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. The government might not be the biggest threat to Google dominance, however. AI has been chipping away at the foundation of the web in the past couple of years, as people have increasingly turned to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information online. These AI chatbots pull information from websites and present you with a tidy summary. This has become a real enough threat to Google that the number of Google searches in Safari fell for the first time ever in April. Google also recently saw its share of the search market dip below 90 percent for the first time in a decade, as AI search takes off. TikTok isn't helping either. Google recognized this inevitability a few years ago and has been trying to reinvent itself accordingly. A couple years ago, it rolled out AI Overviews, which are summaries of search results created by Google's large language model, Gemini. Then Google expanded on that concept earlier this year with AI Mode, a chatbot-based search experience also powered by Gemini that looks an awful lot like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The company announced last week that AI Mode will be rolling out to everyone in the United States in the coming weeks — just look for a sparkly button on the righthand side of the search field that says 'AI Mode.' AI Mode is how I've been trying to learn birding for the past week. Instead of plugging keywords into the old Google search box, I've been entering complex queries and getting back detailed reports. From one three-sentence prompt, AI Mode returned nearly 600 words. There were just nine links to sources, none of which I needed to click, since the chatbot had already summarized the content therein. Only by doing a little bit of digging did I realize that one of the main sources for this summary was a beginner's guide to birdwatching written by my Vox colleague Allie Volpe. This search experience, as is the case with other AI chatbots, is not always awesome. The technology is powered by large language models, which are prone to hallucinations, and so these new search tools tend to be unreliable. Then again, because AI tends to write such convincing copy, you're not always compelled to double-check the results. Publishers are seeing huge declines in traffic from Google as more people bypass the web and ask AI chatbots for information. As I learned from my birding research, it's quicker. And let's be honest, not everything you find from clicking a blue link is 100 percent accurate either. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. It's unnerving for me to admit that I like the new Google. And I expect to see a lot more of it. As part of its blitz of AI announcements, Google also rolled out Gemini in Chrome, which lets the AI assistant see what you're seeing on a website. (It's currently only available for people who subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Ultra plans or for people running beta versions of Chrome.) You can ask questions about what's on the page or ask Gemini to summarize an article. The tool can even analyze YouTube videos in real time. You can almost think of this as a more targeted version of what the new AI Mode search experience does for the entire web, and it seems useful. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. While you'll undoubtedly be able to access the traditional search experience for quite some time, the sheer volume of Google's latest announcements suggests that AI everything is where we're headed. Headlines around that news echoed the gravity of it all. Reporting from Google's developer conference, Platformer's Casey Newton said, 'everything is changing and normal and scary and chill.' Tech analyst Ben Thompson declared 'the death of the ad-supported web,' thanks to Google. New York magazine's John Herrman put it more bluntly: 'Google is burying the web alive.' In the chaotic, early days of the web, Google got popular by simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler points out. Its supremacy in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come along and simplify things this time around, so you can have a user-friendly bot explain things to you, book travel for you, and make movies for you. In the meantime, I'll be trying to perfect my AI-generated crime-fighting Chihuahua cartoon, wondering when any of this will start to feel glorious. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one!
Vox
14-05-2025
- Vox
This life-changing piece of health tech is getting cheaper — and more advanced
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. You can imagine a future where you wear earbuds that are the interface for your voice assistant as well as your lifeline on a loud plane. Vox/Getty Images Hearing aids, like canes or orthopedic shoes, are something you don't think about a lot when you're young. But maybe you should. You probably either know someone who needs hearing aids, or you'll need them some day yourself. About 30 million people in the United States, aged 12 and older, have hearing loss in both ears, and about two-thirds of people end up with hearing loss, which can range from mild to severe, by their 70s. But talking to your parents or grandparents about getting hearing aids can be tough — I've done it. They might not like the idea of sticking things in their ear canals or confronting the difficult realities of aging and health. They surely shy away from the price tag of hearing aids, which can cost thousands of dollars and are not covered by insurance or Medicare. But plugging tiny and exorbitantly expensive speakers into your ears isn't the only way. Your mom might already own hearing aids without even knowing it. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Hearing aids have never been more accessible — or futuristic. In April, a company called Nuance started selling glasses that double as hearing aids thanks to microphones and beam-forming speakers built into the frame. Although at $1,200, they're not cheap, they cost far less than a pair of prescription hearing aids, which tend to range from $2,000 to $7,000. Hearing aids have never been more accessible — or futuristic. You can also buy something that's legally considered a personal sound amplification product (PSAP), which is not designed to treat hearing loss but does make things louder. Some of them can play music and handle phone calls too. In the age when earbuds are ubiquitous, these devices appeal to all ages. 'It's good that we're seeing people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, talking about it, because it's totally changing the paradigm for them of engaging in hearing care earlier,' Nicholas Reed, a faculty member at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told me. I'm a millennial, but I've also dealt with hearing loss my entire life. A bad stretch of childhood ear infections left me mostly deaf in one ear and pretty spotty in the other. I learned to read lips as a teenager and avoid conversations at loud parties in college. Some surgery in my 20s brought me closer to normal, but I could still use a little help. Related The surprising thing I learned from quitting Spotify I've spent the past few weeks trying out the Nuance glasses in various settings. They're remarkable, not only because they feel almost indistinguishable from my regular glasses but also because I forget they're hearing aids. Made by EssilorLuxottica, the company behind Ray-Ban and dozens of other glasses brands, the Nuance glasses employ some of the same technology that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses use to play music and help you talk to AI. And while the Nuance glasses don't currently offer the option to stream audio, they do help you hear what your friend is saying in a loud bar. The AirPods Pro 2, which retail for $250, work equally as well. After Apple announced last fall that a software update would unlock an accessibility setting — it's appropriately called Hearing Aid — I started using it all the time, toggling between listening to podcasts to ordering cold brew in a crowded coffee shop. In instances where I may have needed to ask people to repeat themselves in the past, I hear them fine the first time. I just have to wear AirPods all the time, which makes the glasses solution even more appealing. For most people, hearing loss typically starts in your 50s and gains momentum in your early retirement years. If you've ever been to a busy restaurant with your parents or grandparents, you know this can be alienating for the person left out and frustrating for the hearing person, too. The social isolation can lead to loneliness and anxiety, which can hasten cognitive decline and lower life expectancy. Nevertheless, neither traditional clinical hearing aids or the newer category of devices are easy fixes. Once you start wearing any sort of hearing aid, it takes time to adjust, and you might need help tweaking the sound as you get used to it. That's one reason why so many people avoid it — only one in five who need hearing aids actually have them. You can't put them in your ears and immediately have perfect hearing. Your brain adjusts over time, and so it may take weeks or months to adapt to the new frequencies hearing aids help you hear. Related How technology has inspired neuroscientists to reimagine the brain Still, it's a worthwhile project. 'Sensory input is so key to our existence, but we just sort of overlooked it for so long,' Reed said. 'It's something that's vital to your existence and how you connect with other people.' It's not clear how the latest hearing aid innovation will move the needle on adoption. Even though over-the-counter hearing aids have been available since 2022, when the FDA implemented new regulations for the devices, it's still an uphill battle to get people to wear them. 'Sensory input is so key to our existence, but we just sort of overlooked it for so long.' — Nicholas Reed, faculty member at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine 'We are not seeing large increases in hearing aid uptake since over-the-counter hearing aids have become available,' said Tricia Ashby, senior director of audiology practices at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). 'And I have to say that mimics other countries who had over-the-counter hearing aids before the US did.' Given the fact that the older people who need them most are potentially less likely to try the latest technology, it might still take a few years for over-the-counter hearing aids to go mainstream. Given the precedent set by companies like Apple and Nuance, though, it's possible that more devices will add hearing assistive features to existing products. You can imagine a future where you wear earbuds that are the interface for your voice assistant as well as your lifeline on a loud plane. You might have glasses that project walking directions onto your field of view and help you hear which direction traffic's coming from when you have to cross the street. These kinds of features together only get more important as you get older and need a little more help. 'We are in an age now where you're thinking about optimizing aging, and how do you do it?' Reed said. 'And it's things like this.'
