I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Call Me
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our smartphones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact that we’re buying far fewer of them than we used to.
This week, we talk about what the future looks like for smartphones. They’ll likely get more foldable, their voice features could grow chattier, and they might even come with a chip to recognize AI-generated nonsense and block it like spam. WIRED senior editor and noted techno-grouser Jason Kehe joins our conversation about the future of the phone and the future of our souls.
Show Notes:
Read Lauren’s interviews with five prominent technologists as they predict the phone’s future. The story is part of our WIRED 30 package celebrating our 30th anniversary as a publication.
Recommendations:
Jason recommends Anaximander and the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli. Lauren recommends swimming and not podcasting. Mike recommends Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright.
Jason Kehe can be found on Twitter @jkehe. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lauren, what is that? |
| 0:04.4 | It's a flip phone. It is a Motorola flip phone. One of my first from the 1990s. I don't remember |
| 0:12.3 | exactly what year, but you hear that creaking? Do you hear that? I do. That hinge? Yeah. And then the |
| 0:16.6 | satisfying like, goodbye. See, now flip and hinge and phone all mean completely different things. |
| 0:24.6 | They do. I mean, we don't really use these anymore. Some people do. Some people are like, |
| 0:30.1 | I'm going back to the earth. I'm living in a yurt and I'm using a flip phone. I'm going to be in |
| 0:33.7 | green bubbles forever. I don't need any apps. But it's so satisfying. |
| 0:38.6 | You know what? |
| 0:38.9 | Also, as I was carrying this into the office this morning, I dropped it. |
| 0:41.9 | And I had not a fear about its fate. |
| 0:45.1 | Yeah, because you haven't used it in 20 years. |
| 0:47.2 | Well, yes. |
| 0:48.0 | I mean, I'm not going to go by. |
| 0:49.7 | This is true. |
| 0:50.6 | But I also, it's like a brick. |
| 0:52.2 | It's like a little, who cares? |
| 1:13.9 | There's no, there's no, like, you know, OLED display here that, that I have to worry about. It's just, there's no glass. Right. It's just a little flip phone. Right. Well, it is an artifact of the past and may also be an artifact of the future with the creak and all. That was a, that was a good segue. Should we segue into the actual show now? |
| 1:12.1 | Let's segue. Should we segue into the actual show now? |
| 1:13.9 | Let's segue into the future. |
| 1:15.6 | All right. |
| 1:21.2 | Hi, everyone. |
| 1:24.4 | Welcome to Gadget Lab. |
... |
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