The Missing Pieces From CES 2020
CES 2020 is in the history books, but how will it be remembered? As a bold step forward for the industry, or just another trade show?
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is a massive event that spans across multiple venues and showcases a wide variety of upcoming technologies in all manner of industries.
It’s a place to glimpse the future of technology, and an opportunity to reflect on where are focus lies and where it should be. My first CES was an amazing experience, but instead of highlighting what I saw, I think it’s more important to discuss what I didn’t see.
From General Magic to Genuine Concern
My trip to CES 2020 was book ended with long flights and two distinct documentaries I watched on the plane when I realized that the person in front of me would utilize the full capabilities of their seat recline and make it impossible to work on my MacBook during the flight.
I think it’s appropriate that I watched the excellent General Magic documentary before arriving in Las Vegas. This was the story of a little-known company that conceptualized and released an early version of the smartphones we all own today. The catch? They did this in 1994.
While history doesn’t remember them as it should, these people were pioneers in technology. They couldn’t be the ones to usher in their vision, but it came about all the same.
Being that this was my first CES, I wondered if I would see this same kind of magic on the show floor. Would I have the opportunity to glimpse the next big breakthrough in its earliest stages?
I saw a lot of amazing things at CES 2020, but when I left, it was the missing pieces that stayed with me more than the snazzy AR glasses, 8K TVs, and flying Ubers.
Missing Piece #1: Holistic Sustainability
Sustainability is a word that companies love to throw around, but it’s often used to denote small changes or “wins” that have little impact on the greater whole.
Buying energy credits is great, recycling is a smart move, but these are drops in the bucket while the world quite literally burns all around us.
There’s no shortage of scientific warnings and studies that, in no small terms, outline the drastic changes we need to make if we want Earth to be humanity’s home into the future. Despite this, sustainability was barely on anyone’s mind as my colleagues and I explored the booths of CES 2020.
More than that, we noticed a distinct lack of a holistic approach to the concept. After all, cutting down on energy usage doesn’t matter too much if your supply chain contributes more emissions than you’re saving with your design.
When asked about sustainability in their supply chains, representatives would often skirt around the question, mentioning something about reduced packaging and moving on to the next topic.
One company that did catch my eye was LivingPackets, which showcased their reusable packaging that could eliminate the need for countless cardboard boxes in shipping and logistics.
It’s a big idea to be sure, but I wonder what kind of impact the manufacturing or recirculating of the packages has on the environment. By doing what seems to to be right thing, are we still contributing to the problem? It’s a hard question to answer, but it’s one that we need to ask ourselves.
Missing Piece #2: Quantum Leaps (But I Did See a Quantum Computer!)
Anyone who follows me on Medium and Supplyframe Hardware knows that I have a soft spot for all things quantum.
One of the first things I saw when I entered the Las Vegas Convention Center was IBMs impressive quantum computing display (pictured above).
It’s a beautiful piece of engineering to behold, but it reminded me of a similar design we saw in RealTalk Electronics, the magazine published by Supplyframe in 2018.
Even one of my colleagues noted that many of the things we saw incorporated existing technology like Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa.
Perhaps the moment that solidified things for me was when we were interviewing someone in the automotive area of the show floor.
During the interview, my colleague asked the representative when we could expect to see some of these technologies on the road in a widespread fashion, to which the person replied that many of these technologies were already out there, these are just new ways to harness them.
That was a big moment for me, because it made me realize that technology has reached a point where there are no more “quantum leaps.” Instead, the future is iterative. It’s about making small advancements and leveraging the sensors and data we already have in new and creative ways.
That’s not to say that we’ll never see another massive breakthrough, but for the time being, I believe technology’s pace will slow down and focus on smaller, more deliberate improvements.
Given this, it stands to reason that at least some of the solutions to our problems are already in front of us, we just need to think about different ways to use them. Take Arrow Electronics and Analog Devices, for example. At CES 2020, both of these companies had a booth that showed off a variety of use cases for their Time of Flight cameras. Perhaps the most unique example I saw was a baby monitor that utilized the technology to detect the baby’s breathing patterns and movements.
This was all done in real-time using a doll that demonstrated the technology in action. While TOF sensors are often used in drone collision avoidance, this was a bold new way to leverage an already existing piece of technology in a completely new way.
Missing Piece #3: A Focus on Security and Privacy
Another conversation that was absent from CES 2020 was the topic of how we educate and empower consumers to take privacy and security into their own hands.
I made this realization on the show floor as well, right about the time I saw myself being detected by a smart vision camera that identified my relative age, gender, and lack of glasses or a hat just by scanning me.
The litany of smart home technologies on display were happy to showcase how intelligent they could be.
While they are certainly impressive, there’s little to no mention about how protect your data or your home’s network from intruders.
I’ve often advocated an approach to security that educates and informs the consumer while also considering security from the design stage, but it’s a topic that’s largely absent from the show floor at CES 2020.
Even on the automotive side of things, there’s a steady march towards autonomous vehicles but I still see a lack of discussion surrounding very real safety concerns that we need to address.
There were plenty of autonomous buses that boldly left out any semblance of a steering wheel, and I even saw a few concepts for flying vehicles that could transport people around urban areas, but it all seemed like flashy ideas that avoid the difficult questions.
For example, we still don’t have a good answer for the Trolley Problem when it comes to autonomous vehicles. In a no-win scenario, does a vehicle prioritize the driver or people outside the car? Does it value the lives of many over the lives of one?
Before we can have autonomous vehicles on the road, someone somewhere has to program answers to these questions into the software of our cars. Of course, these kinds of moral quandaries are entirely absent from flashy videos and concepts that showcase entire fleets of self-driving cars on the roads.
The Long Flight Home
I really enjoyed my time at CES 2020.
While I realize that this article is largely a criticism of the industry, I do think there are some amazing ideas out there and some positive trends emerging in various industries.
The problem is that our collective focus isn’t on the things that matter most.
These are difficult questions to answer and even more difficult to implement, but they are necessary.
For my flight back home, I watched a second documentary entitled Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain. Again, I felt it was appropriate as it framed the story of Blockchain through the lens of hacker activists and the pursuit of safety and privacy in the digital world.
While blockchain may not be the solution to all of our problems as some would suggest, it is another example of a technology that can be leveraged in unique ways.
The main takeaway from this second film was a quote:
“The old stuff is just weird stuff we got used to.”
Indeed, technology can often be seen as “weird” to an outsider until it becomes ingrained into our daily lives.
My hope is that these missing pieces, weird as they may seem to companies who are perfectly happy with their focus on buzzwords and big marketing pushes, soon become a larger part of the conversations at CES 2021 and beyond.
