The AI Pin accessibility story is disappointingly untold by Humane.
After much pomp and circumstance, the San Francisco-based tech startup Human this week officially introduced the much-hyped AI Pin. The device, which is spiritually similar to a Star Trek communicator, is a wearable that a person wears on their clothes and can ask questions to their built-in assistant, as well as take pictures. There is also a projector that projects a simple interface into the palm of the user’s hand. According to Humane, the AI Pin costs $699 and pre-orders begin on November 16. It will start shipping sometime next year.
The company, founded by ex-Apple engineers in husband and wife duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, showed off the device and its capabilities in a video released Thursday morning. Humane invited a small group of journalists to an event at its headquarters. Ian Carlos Campbell of Inverse was one of them and filed the file a good story with his initial impressions of Humane’s very fancy soup peg.
The night before, I kind of posted a screed on X/Twitter where I criticize the lack of transparency about AI Pin’s accessibility features. In my opinion, it’s a colossal failure not only on the part of Humane — Chaudhri romantically says in the video that the company “builds not for today but for tomorrow” — but especially on the part of the editors and reporters. It’s not the fault of any particular people, but it’s the collective indifference and absence that really rankles me.
Given the aforementioned pomp and circumstance, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to glean that Humane is pitching the AI Pin as a smartphone replacement. It’s also pretty obvious to gather that, as a company founded and staffed by ex-Apple employees, work on the device has been shrouded in secrecy. If the AI Pin had resources, Apple’s legacy would flow from them. But given the conceit that this thing is supposed to be “the next big thing,” it’s reasonable to wonder just how accessible and inclusive it is. Even a company as tight-fisted as Apple made it clear to me after WWDC this year that the Vision Pro was built with accessibility in mind. Details were (and remain) scarce, but the point is that the company deliberately played on the fears I had—as a journalist and, more importantly, as a lifelong disabled person—that the harbinger of spatial computing would indeed have accessibility from day one. . . Instead, my due diligence to find any shred of accessibility information on the AI Pin has proven fruitless.
Which brings me to the journalistic side of the issues here.
In all the coverage I’ve seen of Humane and its AI Pin, not once have I noticed anyone mention accessibility. Not surprising, but disappointing nonetheless. Tech writers do not need to be experts in accessibility and assistive technologies, as I will simply ask if the AI Pin will be accessible to the disabled community. So many publishers, especially in the early days of my career, rejected my pitches largely because they mistakenly thought that accessibility coverage was too niche and insider. It wasn’t what a wider, mainstream readership would be interested in. More tellingly, they also said they were wary of covering accessibility because they didn’t know anything about it. Which, in retrospect, was a strange admission because… that’s what my job is about because disability is determining factor of my lived experiences.
But then again, a journalist with a modicum of empathy doesn’t need to be the Einstein of accessibility to at least ask questions. As I tweeted last night, there are a lot of questions. What if you have a speech delay like stuttering and the assistant can’t understand you? What if you can’t button or pin your clothes? What if you can’t open your palms for the projector’s user interface? Does the user interface in question support text size or contrast or screen reader options? These questions are crucial to the AI Pin’s usability story, yet no one has the conscience to ask them.
Should disabled people assume that AI Pin is only for fully disabled people?
There is a twisted irony in the fact that a company calls itself humane and talks about high-end ideas like the technology of tomorrow and the enhancement of humanity. Do disabled people just not fit their view of humanity?
I have to admit it’s early days for AI Pin and, like Apple and Vision Pro, maybe Humane is undertake to make the device accessible. However, it’s annoying to project this grand vision of the future without at least acknowledging that not all of humanity uses technology in the same way.
On the journalism side, the complete lack of questioning about accessibility is yet another example of how far journalism has to go in DEI initiatives. It’s not an either/or scenario. People with disabilities are not asking newsrooms to choose other aspects of social justice reporting over others. It’s about empathy and inclusion. People with disabilities deserve to have their voices heard just like any other underrepresented group, especially when you consider that we make up the largest marginalized group on the planet. So many institutions imagine themselves to be staunch advocates of DEI when, in reality, their actions strongly exclude people with disabilities. The whole message is hollow and feels disingenuous.
The priorities of the media industry, and the seeming lack of care in this realm of social justice reporting, become starkly clear when you see an outlet hiring a full-time Taylor Swift reporter. It’s definitely an option.
Whether the AI Pin sinks or swims remains to be seen. One thing is certain right now: Accessibility will play a part in this either way.
For now, AI Pin’s accessibility story is disappointingly untold.
