When intelligence is not using AI

The internet just got done making fun of Mark Zuckerberg's epic fail of a launch day for their "smart" glasses. I thought that would be the end of it. But then a promotional email from them landed in my inbox.

Opening the email, here's the first thing we see...

"Athletic Intelligence Is Here"... sounds potentially cool until you see the image directly below it - with a serious cyclist asking his glasses *the #1 question* a cyclist never has to ask.

"How far have I gone???" I have a number of serious cyclist friends. This information is literally mounted right in front of them on their bikes' handlebars. And if the bicyclist doesn't have one of those, they're probably more like me, making the routine trip home from work, for whom this question is not top of mind.

Pan down the email and we're introduced to a runner who, mid-run, feels the need to ask her glasses another hard-hitting question.

"How am I doing??" This question both is too vague for even a super-intelligent AI do to anything with and raises questions about why this person doesn't know "how she's doing" simply by checking in with her eyeballs and nervous system.

Finally, we come to the third and most epic beat of the promotion - the moment where an unnamed aspiring athlete uses Meta AI to "maximize" their workout.

"What's a good marathon training program???" I have so many questions. A marathon is quite a commitment: is this person looking for a quick 2-year couch-to-marathon program? Or are they already a marathon runner, in which case... why would they need to ask an AI? And either way, why are they asking their glasses? Are they doing this having already started a workout and, 10 minutes in, are feeling disappointed with their progress thus far towards a marathon?

At this point, I really couldn't tell whether this was an April Fool's Day gag ad from Meta or the output of a marketing team that has come completely unmoored from reality.

My hope is that this was just a fringe marketing team who had no idea what the glasses were actually designed for. However, between this email and the bizarre on-stage demos they did, I'm increasingly convinced that this represents Meta's best efforts to sell the public on an AI-powered lifestyle. But is it a better lifestyle?

If we judge this based on the questions featured in this ad, I think not. To be fair, the glasses, themselves, may be amazing. They actually review quite well. What's concerning is how low the bar seems to be for selling the public on the utility of AI. My hope is that nobody is fooled that they need AI glasses to help them with athletics. Because the alternative is that they do trick some of us into believing this. That's a world in which a cyclist doesn't know how to read an odometer, a runner doesn't know how to pay attention to her own body, and a person is surfing other workouts rather than finish the one they've already started. I don't think that's moving us in the right direction.

Marketing has always been about selling the public what they didn't know they needed. When it comes to AI, though, they're often selling us the idea that we should use shortcuts to avoid using our brain and common sense.

Weaning us off of our brains seems like a really bad idea. In contrast to the email I received, "athletic intelligence" already is here because athletes use their brains. The fastest way we get rid of intelligence is by needlessly and thoughtlessly adopting AI, which is what marketing firms around the world are pushing us to do.