It's A Star Trek World--I Just Live Here

Early cell phones--particularly flip phones--were often compared to the communicators in the original Star Trek series. A company called Humane thinks it has a replacement for the handheld communicator cell phone and it appears to mimic the badge communicators from The Next Generation and later iterations of Trek:

• "Humane Wants Its New Ai Pin to Liberate You From Your Phone Screen"--Time Magazine.
• "Talk to the hand! Bizarre AI device uses a laser to project your phone onto your PALM - but it has an eye-watering price tag"--Daily Mail. 

The Time article begins:

    Ken Kocienda walks toward me, with a small white square pinned to his shirt. He taps the square with two fingers, eliciting a beep. “Play songs written by Prince, but not performed by Prince,” he says.

    Another beep. The Sinéad O’Connor version of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’—a song originally written by Prince—begins to play.

    Kocienda raises his palm. A green volume meter, pause button, and next-song button appear on his hand. He twists his wrist clockwise, and the volume rises. Anticlockwise, and the song gets quieter. He clasps his fingers, and the music pauses completely. Then he drops his hand and the green laser display vanishes.

    “I just love the way the computer’s there, and then the computer’s gone,” Kocienda tells me, maintaining eye contact. “One of the aspects is, you stay in the moment with people that you’re with.”

    Kocienda is the head of product engineering at Humane, a San Francisco company which, on Thursday, launched a device that its creators hope will be the iPhone for the AI generation. While the wearable computer, called the Humane Ai Pin, has a laser display that can be projected onto your hand if needed, the idea is that the device is screenless, instead conversing with its user in the form of speech. Its operating system calls upon AI large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, for tasks as varied as calling a friend, translating a face-to-face conversation in real time, taking photographs, reminding you what your partner texted you last Thursday, or settling a dinnertime dispute about how many moons Jupiter has. ...