Dear Backchannel readers,

Last summer, Backchannel joined Condé Nast as part of the Wired Media Group. For all of the reasons you imagine, it made sense. Though we have our own distinct personality, we’re a lot like Wired. In fact, Steven and Jessi both hail from Wired. And like the editors there, we have a deep conviction that accurately reported news presented with context is a critical tool for understanding the future.

And now, a year later, we’re closing the circle. Backchannel is joining forces with our sister publication. Starting June 21, we will begin publishing Backchannel as a weekly digital magazine on wired.com. As players in a news cycle that’s rapidly approaching light speed, we believe our work will stand out more as a weekly event — an occasion — than as yet more fodder for the daily churn. And now we’ll be hosted on Wired’s site, rather than on Medium. We will still be editorially independent, of course, and our staff is unchanged.

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What does this mean for you? Things are about to get a lot better. We’ll still bring you our signature brand of informed writing by us and opinionated pieces by insiders like Karen Wickre and Susan Crawford. But now we’ll work even more closely with our Wired colleagues to produce meaningful stories, and to distribute them across all the platforms where readers look for informed commentary on technology’s growing impact on our lives.

Okay, but why are we leaving Medium? The short answer is that we love the platform and the thoughtful community that has coalesced around our publication because of Medium. But in the time since Backchannel launched, Medium has shifted its business strategy, and it’s no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit. To bring you the tech reporting that matters most, we must fund it. Under new editor Nick Thompson, Wired is committed to figuring out how to make a robust business off of thoughtful, meaty journalism. We share this vision and believe that by bringing our publications even closer together, we’ll be doubling down on Backchannel’s original mission.

You’ll still find us at backchannel.com, as well as on Twitter and Facebook. The best way to stay informed, however, is to sign up to receive Backchannel weekly in your inbox.

Please note: Even if you are getting this current newsletter through Medium, you still need to make this signup.

Let us know what you think: You can always reach us at editors@backchannel.com.

Last, a note of thanks. Backchannel has come to life because of you. Your comments, highlights, and story ideas have pushed our thinking and transformed our publication into a collaborative endeavor. We look forward to bringing you many more stories you’ll love in the months to come.

Along with senior editor Alexis Sobel Fitts and editorial associate Miranda Katz, we remain gratefully yours —

Jessi, Steven, and Sandra

Backchannel Is Moving to Wired was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi Backchannel readers, it’s Jessi.

On Wednesday, Kleiner Perkins investor Mary Meeker delivered her annual internet trends report at Code Conference, the annual south-of-Los Angeles gathering that feels as much like a summer camp reunion as a tech confab. Meeker always presents early in the morning of the second day. To tech newbies, her presentation must seem like one of the strangest rituals in the industry — a core dump of stats, charts, and headlines, dense with exotic acronyms and hockey-stick curves. But it’s ambrosia to tech business insiders. At Code, attendees tend to meander in and out of sessions depending on the popularity of the speaker, but the seats are always filled for Meeker’s unveiling.

Basically, Meeker is delivering tech’s State of the Union address. To wit: Meeker’s report not only captures the internet moment in time, but also sets the agenda for anyone attempting to get in on the next big thing. Missing it could be missing a stake in the next unicorn.

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This year, after explaining that her presentation was meant to be read, not heard, Meeker raced through her 355 slides in 33 minutes with all of the charisma of Apple’s Siri—picking up speed as she went. Every year, she adds more slides. In her first presentation, delivered in 2001, she had just 25. This year, no one seemed to care about her presentation style; they were too busy scrutinizing her data — and tweeting the gems.

By now, you’ve likely come across her biggest bets on, oh, every tech blog you’ve read. She says global smartphone growth is slowing, though it’s surging in India. Netflix is growing, while TV viewership continues to decline. Voice really is a big deal — one in five mobile queries were made by voice, and, she says, accuracy is now at 95 percent. She’s bullish on all sorts of things, like the rise of tech in China, the importance of immigrants to the industry, and the coming boom in healthcare tech.

But why exactly does Meeker’s data dump resonate so strongly? Because she’s one of a kind. Meeker’s been at this forever. As an analyst at Morgan Stanley, she had an unwavering conviction that all business would digitize. In late 1995, when just 35 million people were online, she published The Internet Report, which quickly became a bible for anyone trying to grok the web. You could buy your own 322-page copy at your local Barnes & Noble. In it, she predicted rather forcibly that within five years, 150 million would surf the ‘net. (In fact, more than twice that many people were online by 2000. Even Meeker could not be optimistic enough about the biggest sea change in our time.)

In those heady internet years, Meeker was the top-ranked industry analyst working with Morgan Stanley’s top banker, Ruth Porat. And though she was certainly party to the stock boosterism that landed many of her peers in trouble in the early aughts, she truly believed in the potential of the companies she backed. Unlike peers such as Henry Blodget or Frank Quattrone, she was never indicted or fined. She continued as Morgan Stanley’s rockstar internet analyst until 2010, when she joined Kleiner Perkins. These days, Meeker leads growth stage investments for the firm. (Porat, too, eventually moved to tech; she’s now Alphabet’s chief financial officer.)

Meeker is not a seer. She hasn’t been right about everything. But for decades, she has pored through voluminous amounts of data and lived the history of the web, and she scrutinizes all of her inputs to make educated guesses about its future. That’s the reason why, in the weeks to come, founders and investors alike will slip her slides into their own funding requests and board presentations.

And already, they’re making bets on how many slides she’ll slip into next year’s presentation. 400, anyone?

This week on Backchannel:

The Melt had cash, technology, and some of Silicon Valley’s finest minds — yet it failed to disrupt the humble sandwich. Bianca Bosker on how the trendiest grilled cheese venture got burnt.

Steve Jobs had a vision to resurrect pre-tech Silicon Valley in his new HQ. It was up to this hippie arborist to make it happen. Steven Levy on Apple Park’s tree whisperer.

Checking your electronics is as risky as it is inconvenient. Sigh. Dan Gillmor on what to do if the laptop ban goes global.

The Queen of the Internet Surveys Her Kingdom was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, Backchannel readers, Steven here. I’m still damp from sitting in the Harvard Yard rain yesterday to see something that never happened in almost 200 years of commencement speeches there: A dropout from the college addressed the graduates barely a decade after the rest of his own class got diplomas. Indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explicitly spoke as a millennial addressing somewhat younger people of his generation. The distinction was key to his talk, which was rapturously received by thousands of soggy recent graduates and alumni.

This speech was a big deal to Zuckerberg, and he wanted to make a statement with it. He did. It was all about purpose.

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After some crowd-friendly inside-Harvard chatter — and a story about Facemash, the “prank website” that almost got him booted from the school — he got to his point. While he assumes that all millennials (or maybe just the Harvard ones he was speaking to) are already on-board the purpose train, he argued that this generation should devote energies to encouraging purpose in others, as well as fixing society so that less privileged people might have the encouragement and economic freedom to attempt any ambitious challenge they dream up.

If all this has a smell of political inspiration, that’s a common thing with Zuckerberg these days. His personal 2017 challenge has been a multi-state listening tour that has put him in contact with people in all circumstances, from farm families to opioid addicts. When hearing about this — or reading his recent manifesto on communities — people usually ask whether he’s running for office. Zuckerberg flatly denies that’s the case. I tend to believe him. He did not grow up dreaming of being president, but rather something along the lines he’s doing now. In any case, those heartland journeys will be valuable material for his continued tenure as the head of a company intending to connect the world. When you’re head of Facebook, your constituency is everybody.

What’s more, you have a bully pulpit that may have more credibility than the White House, at least this current one. Zuckerberg wasn’t elected by anyone, but almost two billion people have voted — enthusiastically or not — to use his service, and to many it’s as central to their lives as a key government service. Foreign and domestic leaders, from mayors to presidents, flock to Menlo Park for selfies, or roll out the carpet when Zuckerberg visits. (Or at least they drive him around in their cars.) And, of course, he gets to be the youngest, if not the richest, commencement speaker in Harvard’s history. (But Harvard didn’t invite that wealthier guy, Bill Gates, until the Microsoft cofounder was in his 50s.) So Zuckerberg felt perfectly comfortable citing visions proposed by presidents — the New Deal and the Great Society — in calling for a “new social contract for our generation.”

Breaking down some of the aspects of this agenda, we can get a pretty good idea of what Zuckerberg would be politicking for if he were running for public office.

Taxes on the rich would be high. “There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans,” he said. “People like me should pay [for changes].”

He’d devote resources to fight climate change. “How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved in manufacturing and installing solar panels?”

We’d have plenty of trade agreements. “Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.”

He’d call for immigration reform now — and make those Dreamers into citizens. He choked up when describing his relationship with a young undocumented resident he was mentoring.

Voting would get a tech boost. He said, “How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online?” I bet Russian cyber-attackers will love that one.

Also: affordable childcare, portable health insurance, and even a stab at universal basic income!

Left unsaid was that virtually every point is the polar opposite of those coming from the administration now in office. In fact, he didn’t utter the name of our president at all. But he did say that the struggle of our time is a “battle of ideas” pitting “the forces of freedom, openness, and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration against those who would slow them down.” That could be taken as one long anti-Trump subtweet.

OK, he’s not running for office. But we are a long way from Facemash.

Eli Pariser Predicted the Future. Now He Can’t Escape It. Speaking of filter bubbles, the guy who made the term famous is now dealing with the fact that his warnings have proved horribly prophetic. In a candid interview with Jessi Hempel, he says that fake news isn’t the problem — but rather, the problem is whether the “truth speaks loud enough.” Must-read.

How Fonts are Fueling the Culture Wars. What, you think fonts are just design elements? In a fascinating story, Ben Hersh shows how fonts can convey political menace, hamper texts, and even affect an election (one more Hillary mistake: getting too corporate with that logo).

How Drivers are Finally Outfoxing Uber. The troubled ridesharing service has long been at odds with the contractors who drive its passengers. Miranda Katz reports on the increasingly effective efforts of New York City drivers to get more favorable terms — including the elusive in-app tip.

Zuckerberg Isn’t Running For Office. But Here’s What He’d Do If He Were. was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi Backchannel readers, this is Sandra.

In the early 1700s, Peter the Great, the czar of Russia, was busy nabbing land from his western neighbor, the Swedish Empire. He seized the tip of the Gulf of Finland, and began building his beloved city of Saint Petersburg there. He also secured a small island just off its coast as a naval defense: Kotlin.

Peter couldn’t have known that more than three centuries and 5,500 miles removed, software developers piled into Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheatre would be swooning at the name of that island. But swoon they did, when Google announced official support for a programming language called Kotlin. Standing on stage on Wednesday morning at Google I/O, Android PM Director Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson broke the news that Kotlin, which was first released in 2012, is now officially supported as a “first class” language for Android. Compared to other announcements that day — big plans for VR, the reveal of Google Lens, an ongoing obsession with machine learning — this one held less strategic and intellectual heft. But the app builders in the audience didn’t care. Polite and reserved through all the other keynote announcements, the developers whooped freely when told that they no longer had to worry that Kotlin fever was just a phase, to be abandoned like dozens of other cult favorites before it.

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When the cheers died down, Cuthbertson quoted a colleague who had tried Kotlin and then gushed, “I think I am in love.” The romance isn’t restricted to Google. Elsewhere on the web, a programmer wrote, “I’m so jaded that I didn’t think it was possible to love a language ever again, but Kotlin is just gorgeous.” Another called Kotlin “our good lord and savior.” A third: “Oh my God, this is it. This is what loving a programming language is like.”

Designed by Saint Petersburg-based engineers at JetBrains, a company that builds tools for developers, Kotlin was intended to improve on the shortcomings of Java (the dominant language for Android) while being completely interoperable with it, meaning you could switch to Kotlin mid-project without having to rewrite old Java code. For the many Android developers who have long cursed Java’s weaknesses, such as its awkward type system and its verbosity, this shift, says Cuthbertson, promises to “make programming fun again.” As Google explained in its blog post announcing the news, “If when writing code you have asked yourself questions that began ‘why do I have to …?’ you will be pleased to learn that in Kotlin the answer to many of those questions is ‘you don’t!’” On cue, the top trending repository on Github on Thursday was JetBrains/kotlin.

For Google, keeping its community of developers happy is essential as the need for apps expands from phones to the burgeoning Internet of Things. Saving developers time and headaches translates directly into more experiences for users across Google’s growing array of platforms.

That said, Kotlin is still a young language. In the venerable TIOBE Index ranking popular programming languages, it has yet to crack the top 50. But when it comes to the love affairs between developers and their modes of self expression, Kotlin might be top of the heap. As one engineer tweeted in response to Google’s news this week, “I’m almost crying right now.”

This week on Backchannel:

Crowdfunding Platforms Crack Down on Risky Campaigns: High-profile crowdfunding flops have become almost routine, and the platforms that host them are scrambling for solutions. This week, Kickstarter announced a suite of services to help creators get their ideas to the finish line. As Mark Harris writes, crowdfunding platforms are growing up — and not a moment too soon.

Inside Google’s Slow-Mo VR Moonshot: At I/O this week, Clay Bavor ran through Google’s plans for what he calls “immersive computing” (VR and AR)—but he worries that the huge hype about VR is producing unrealistic expectations. Google is playing the long game when it comes to VR and AR, and our Steven Levy has a deep look at what that actually looks like.

Human Resources Isn’t About Humans: “Whether we call it HR or use more contemporary terms like “people operations,” “employee engagement,” or “talent team,” this arena is very much a corporate function,” writes our career expert Karen Wickre. In other words, HR works for the man. But it doesn’t have to be that way — and Wickre has a number of suggestions for how to fix it.

One more thing…

This is not our only newsletter! Every Tuesday, we send out a digest of our top stories, plus a mini-profile of the behind-the-scenes person you most need to know in tech that week. But you have to sign up to get it, even if you currently receive the one you’re reading now.

The Language that Stole Android Developers’ Hearts was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi Backchannel readers. It’s Jessi. Magic Leap quietly settled a gender discrimination lawsuit this week. I reached out, both to the company and to the former employee, to see if there was more story to share and—no surprise—there wasn’t.

But there’s one interesting question to ask when such a document drops: Why would Magic Leap settle this now? The timing isn’t that unusual — the suit was filed in February and the settlement suggests the company addressed it promptly. But I asked a few folks, and discovered that the company is raising funds again. The D round, I’m told, isn’t locked up yet, but it will value Magic Leap at $6–8 billion. Once again, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will lead. (Alibaba’s executive chairman Joe Tsai sits on the board along with Google’s Sundar Pichai.)

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Just 15 months ago, the Florida-based mixed reality company raised $793.5 million, adding to the $592 million it had previously raised and earning a valuation at $4.5 billion. Since then, aside from stay-the-course tweets from CEO Rony Abovitz, we’ve heard little from Magic Leap, and we have yet to see a product come to market—or even a date announced for when it will. Skeptics aren’t sure Magic Leap can pull off what it has promised, and a December report in The Information suggested that the company’s first product won’t ship with the technology that it shows in its demos. Meanwhile, competitors such as Microsoft’s HoloLens have been available for so long that they don’t seem new anymore.

The company is trying to do a crazy thing. It’s trying to introduce the future of computing not incrementally, but all at once, out of the box. (I toured Magic Leap several times last year, and tried the tech. It was impressive.) And rather than moving headquarters to Silicon Valley, it’s doing that from a suburb outside of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, with a charismatic, empathetic dreamer for a leader who speaks in Star Wars metaphors, doesn’t let anyone into his Chocolate Factory, and avoids conflict at all cost.

And because there’s no product, we have no signs by which to judge the potential of its success—except the rumors that leak out.

But it’s also important to remember that there’s no clear market yet. We know augmented reality is on the horizon, but on Gartner’s hype cycle, we’re currently in the trough of disillusionment. The HoloLens is finding its initial customers among enterprise clients, who have deeper wallets. Consumers have so far shown they’re not as interested in paying big bucks for virtual reality headsets as Oculus hoped, and it’s not clear what they’re going to want from augmented reality headsets. Not to mention the fact that we need better everything, from batteries to 5G networks to conversational interfaces, for headsets to be awesome.

Magic Leap may fail. It may fail spectacularly, in the kind of blowup that makes for a great business tale. Or it may fail only in its ambition to be the Apple of augmented reality — and instead become yet another technology company powering devices and services that help Alibaba to better compete with Microsoft and Facebook. It’s also possible that it may succeed spectacularly.

But the only thing that is true now is that we don’t know. And Alibaba is about to buy Magic Leap even more time to figure its future out.

This week on Backchannel:

Mark Harris on self-driving trucks at Uber: “Even as Kalanick boasts about his company’s latest venture into trucking, a parallel, conflicting story is now emerging around the company’s ambitions for autonomous freight.”

Susan Crawford on a little cable company that exposed telecom’s Achilles’ heel: “If people begin noticing that there’s no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that’s a big problem for Big Cable.”

Lisa A. Goldstein on how airlines fail people with disabilities: “As terrible as airline travel is, if you have any kind of unusual need, it’s invariably worse.”

Person of Interest:

If you’ve stuck with us this far, you’re probably already subscribed to our new Tuesday newsletter. What? You’ve never heard of it? Clearly, you’re missing out on a weekly profile of the behind-the-scenes person you most need to know in tech. Sign up here to read us.

Magic Leap Could Be Looking at an $8 Billion Valuation was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, folks, Steven here. Earlier this week, I cited Peter Thiel’s now iconic complaint: “We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters.” I used the quote to tee up an interview regarding flying cars — which now seem to be imminent, for better or worse — but didn’t examine the second part of the sentence, which implied that “140 characters” was a frivolous and trivial advance. Actually, the ability to tap out a short message from anywhere in the world that could instantly reach a potential audience of many millions is an astounding power. Certainly Mark Zuckerberg understands this, as he has guided Facebook more and more toward becoming a public platform. And by integrating Facebook Live into his service, Zuckerberg allows his two billion users to become broadcasters.

But on Facebook Live and similar instant-broadcast online products, there is no seven-second delay that gives a full-time content cop a chance to block inappropriate video streams. Such a solution doesn’t scale, so the basic instrument is a multi-prong effort that relies on users reporting offending posts, algorithms further identifying them, and human monitors evaluating them. Nonetheless, when people post can’t-unsee images such as murders, beatings, rape, or suicide, horrific scenes are circulated for a time period that, whether measured in minutes or hours, is always too long.

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Of course, this issue isn’t limited to live feeds — it applies to uploaded content as well, and even vicious text comments. Very bad behavior is the bane of all services that welcome contributions from unvetted communities. Facebook, with the biggest audience and a mission based on sharing, is most exposed, and Zuckerberg addressed the situation last week. “If we’re going to build a safe community,” he wrote in a post, “we need to respond quickly.” He promised to hire 3,000 new people working in the company’s community operations — a significant jump from the current 4,500.

Lately, there has been a spate of stories about the plight of those whose jobs require them to view a constant stream of nightmare images; as you might expect, they suffer painful after-effects, even years after leaving the job. Not ideal. Everyone seems to agree that the ultimate burden of policing content at scale will fall on artificial intelligence — powerful deep-learning networks that can effectively scan billions of videos and figure out which ones will give us nightmares, or require instant police actions. (Forget the Turing Test: We’ll know computers have consciousness when the first one sues for having PTSD.) Because it will be quite a while before AI programs can make the subtle distinctions between disturbing videos we need to see (unjust killings with social import) and those we don’t (parent kills kids), for now, humans will work in concert with those programs to try to minimize false positives.

It’s almost impossible to totally eliminate terrible content in a huge open network. But I’m pretty confident that the incredible pressure on Facebook and other companies will lead them to find the right combination of humans and AI to dramatically cut the time it takes to identify and block inappropriate posts, and even identify some potential suicides in time to alert authorities.

It seems churlish to worry about a downside to this effort. But the innovations required to identify and eliminate disturbing content on social networks might also be of great value to companies and institutions that impose censorship on their subjects.

I am reminded of a 2006 House Subcommittee on Human Rights hearing on technology companies adhering to Chinese rule when entering its market. Google had introduced its search engine, subject to Chinese censorship, and Congressman. Jim Leach asked its representative how it identified the page links it withheld from users. (Because the Chinese didn’t provide a set of forbidden sites, companies had to figure out for themselves which content would violate the censor’s standards.) The answer involved a clever scheme where Google actually fed keywords into existing search engines like Baidu, and saw which ones were blocked. It was the kind of out-of-the-box solution that Google hires engineers to invent. Leach was appalled. “So if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor,” he said, “we would go to you, the company that should symbolize the greatest freedom of information in the history of man?”

Of course, Facebook’s efforts aren’t meant to promote censorship: No one should be unexpectedly exposed to disturbing images. But as our best minds become devoted to identifying and removing specific content at scale, let’s also recognize that it’s more important than ever to make sure we elect and support leaders who won’t use those tools against us.

Here’s some of what we published on Backchannel this week:

Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from “Guys With Hoodies.” The potential to help censors is only one of a long list of unintended consequences of AI. We’d do a better job of avoiding them if the engineers involved were a diverse pool. Melinda Gates and celebrated computer scientist Fei-Fei Li recently sat down with our Jessi Hempel to call out AI’s diversity problem and suggest some remedies.

Sebastian Thrun Defends Flying Cars to Me. Here’s that flying cars piece I mentioned earlier. I put Sebastian Thrun, CEO of the Larry Page-funded Kitty Hawk flying-car startup, on the grill as he sportingly handles my cranky questions about whether personal airborne transportation is just a sci-fi billionaire fetish.

Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code — But Can’t. You’d think an obvious solution to the scandalous unemployment rate for veterans would be a massive effort to teach them computer skills. But the GI Bill won’t pay for enrollment in the coding academies that have sprung up to fill a need for tech workers. Andrew Zaleski profiles a vet who is taking on this problem. Backchannel is proud to publish important, underreported stories like these, instead of churning out generic articles about earnings results.

This isn’t our only newsletter!

Check out our new one. It’s a Tuesday note that zeroes in on a “person of interest” that you absolutely must know about. Miranda Katz will also connect you to the must-reads, on Backchannel and elsewhere, that will make you more informed than the poor souls who have yet to receive this gem in their inbox. But you have to sign up to get it, even if you currently receive the one you’re reading now.

The Downside of Policing Violent Videos was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi Backchannel readers, it’s Jessi.

Earlier this week, Amazon introduced the Echo Look, a $199 Alexa-enabled camera. Speak to the white oblong assistant, and it will take selfies of your outfits and let you consult style experts to improve them. It’s a smart way for Amazon to begin collecting data about what we like to wear, which will inevitably inform the company’s primary business, selling us what we like to buy. But from where I sit, that’s the least interesting thing about this device. You should think of the Echo Look, instead, as Amazon’s Trojan horse. By adding a camera, Amazon has just added a massive new source of data. And by moving its personal voice assistant from the kitchen, where it has dutifully been updating you on the weather, to the bedroom, Amazon is familiarizing us with the idea that wherever we are in our homes (or our cars), Amazon is at our beck and call.

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Not that long ago, Alexa was a novelty. It launched two years before its closest competitor, Google Home, and customers delighted in its games and tricks (and the occasional joke). But today, nearly every large tech company is trying to position itself as the new operating system for the voice-activated era. Just six months after it launched, Google Home has already proven itself a formidable rival. Microsoft and Apple are reported to be working on their own products.

As I wrote in December, Amazon was able to capture an early lead because it adopted a simple strategy: It under-promised and over-delivered. When Apple introduced its personal assistant, it promised a human-like experience; Siri wasn’t nearly as intelligent, particularly in the early days. By contrast, Amazon offered a simple, voice-enabled speaker that could respond to a few commands. It never promised to carry on sophisticated conversations; it played music and answered some simple commands. As people fell for the device, developers began programming new skills for it and it became even more interesting to its owners.

But the fact that Amazon has taught us a new habit doesn’t guarantee it will be the company to dominate the future market. Though more than eight million people now own an Echo, that’s still less than three percent of the people in the United States. And by the middle of the year, Strategy Analytics predicts that Google will have sold its first million devices, positioning it to catch up quickly. What’s more, Google’s product is already better than Amazon in some areas. Earlier this month, the company announced that Google Home can recognize up to six different voices; Amazon can’t do that. So the company must work aggressively to improve Alexa, and to ensure that consumers find lots of different reasons to love it before they every even try a competitor.

In roll-out, the Echo Look is classic Amazon. The company has launched a one-trick pony of a device, marketing it according to one use case. If it takes off, the first people who buy it will be fashion-conscious selfie-takers. But of course once they get it into their bedrooms, it’s likely they’ll discover what others have before them: Alexa-enabled devices are useful for a lot of different things. Just scroll down to the bottom of Amazon’s advertisement for the Echo Look, where Amazon tells you it’s always getting smarter and lists the many non-fashion-related tasks you can perform.

And, Amazon has paired voice with vision. This has the potential to make the system infinitely more powerful by supercharging it with data from a new source, adding even more context. Sight is another sensor, and it’s got the potential to make a voice-operated system even smarter.

This is a conversation I’ve long had with Evan Nisselson, founder of LDV Capital and the convener of the LDV Vision Summit. Many years before we were snapping selfies on every device, he understood that images were language, and that computers were going to grow better and better at reading that language. When the Echo Look launched earlier this week, he reminded me of his theory on the “Internet of Eyes.” That’s his thesis on what will become possible as computer vision allows objects to see. “The combination of different types of visual data from photographic, thermal, CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasound, and white light with computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will deliver high quality signals unlike anything we’ve had previously,” he wrote in a recent piece on the subject.

If Amazon’s goal is for Alexa to be able to converse with you, it will need to know a hell of a lot more about you. As a sensor that’s able to detect the context of an object, a camera will be crucial to that effort. The Echo Look may start with fashion selfies, but surely, Amazon must believe, people will find other interesting things to do with it. It’s worked out that way for Amazon so far, at least.

This week on Backchannel:

Kevin Kelly on artificial intelligence: “Because we are solving problems we could not solve before, we want to call this cognition “smarter” than us, but really it is different than us. It’s the differences in thinking that are the main benefits of AI.”

Steven Levy in conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: “I think it’s really important that we maintain open channels to our leaders, whether we like what they’re saying or not, because I don’t know of another way to hold them accountable”

Susan Crawford on the FCC chair’s plan to roll back net neutrality: “If Ajit Pai, President Trump’s FCC chairman, gets his way, the federal government will do nothing to protect you.”

QUICK QUIZ: Do you know who Jill Hazelbaker is? How about Jeff Blackburn? Wang Haifeng? If you’re reading our new Tuesday newsletter, I expect you scored 100 percent. Uber’s Hazelbaker, Amazon’s Blackburn, and Baidu’s Wang have all been featured as our weekly Person of Interest. The Tuesday POI is our insider-y take on the insiders — the people behind the news. If you want to understand how the big decisions get made in our industry, you have to know something about the people behind them. So, sign up here and we’ll keep you briefed.

The Echo Look is Amazon’s Trojan Horse was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.