Liz’s view
People mostly yawned through Apple’s new product lineup unveiled this week. It’s hard to get jazzed about the two millimeters of pocket space reclaimed by the thinner model.
But live-translating AirPods are one of the more exciting and tangible uses of AI I’ve seen so far. They foreshadow AI that doesn’t just make things cheaper, but makes entirely new things possible.
The new AirPods are a concrete example of something I’ve had trouble envisioning, 18 months into this hype cycle. It’s easy enough to see the cost savings from AI as technology replaces humans. But by PWC’s estimate, two-thirds of AI’s contributions to global economic growth will come not from gains in productivity but from gains in consumption. In this vision, AI will spark the creation of more goods that people want to buy, and make them available to more people.
Railroads didn’t just reduce the cost of shipping goods; they opened the West. Fiber-optic cable didn’t simply make communication easier, but birthed the internet. Transformative technologies create bigger pies, not just cheaper ones.
Language barriers act as invisible tariffs on the global economy. They add friction to financial markets, artificially constrain talent pools, and leave money stranded on the wrong side of comprehension. Flip that switch, and suddenly every market becomes accessible, and good ideas trapped behind a language wall get unleashed. Goldman Sachs can deploy its sharpest minds in Brazil without Portuguese fluency. My failed hunt for custom blazers in Hong Kong last year can become a completed transaction. (Also: tips for next time, please.) Netflix’s “localization” model becomes possible for new industries.
There’s something dystopian about a world where everyone is sporting AirPods all the time, but I suspect the future is heavy on wearables anyway. The question is whether that hardware expands or merely entertains. Technology that opens up new avenues meets the hype in a way that AI replacing baby investment bankers or advertising studios just doesn’t.
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Room for Disagreement
Alex Kantrowitz wrote for BuzzFeed in 2019 of the AirPod Barrier, a separation “just disrespectful enough to give someone pause” and add the kind of friction to social interactions (and commercial ones — just ask baristas) that Apple is now trying to remove by solving the language gap.
Notable
- Two countries sharing a common language is as big a contributing factor to trade between them as sharing a physical border, according to a French government research office that found trade is 72% higher than between linguistically distant countries.
- Will Apple keep this translation technology inside its walled garden?, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti asks.
- “It’s about removing a barrier between two people. That’s the standard Apple should keep chasing—AI exactly where it makes life better,” writes Inc. columnist Jason Aden.