Ai kill phone screen

Open your eyes first thing in the morning. You don’t reach for your smartphone to scroll through unread notifications. Instead, you activate the array of tiny embedded wearables under your skin, then hold a string of quick back-and-forths with the inanimate objects around your home. You flick your hand through the air just like the characters in Minority Report, blink a few times to confirm commands, and just like that: systems power up, your morning tasks get queued and underway, and your day officially begins. The twist? You never needed a smartphone at all to pull it off.

Right now, AI commentators are falling over themselves to make grand, sweeping predictions about artificial intelligence. We get endless takes on eroding critical thinking, doomsday scenarios where AI ends human civilization, and constant hand-wringing about AI stealing millions of jobs. But this focus has always felt a little off to us. It’s not that we think these apocalyptic warnings are completely unfounded—we just think they’re ignoring the most obvious, already visible shift AI will bring to how society works. Today, our entire lives revolve around the unforgiving, constant glow of screens. They’re everywhere we look. But in the AI-powered future, they’ll simply, mercifully, disappear.

In other words, AI won’t just make the smartphone obsolete. If it’s developed thoughtfully, it will free us from the tyranny of screens entirely.

So why aren’t more people talking about this coming shift? At least Sam Altman has hinted at it. When pressed recently at a private dinner about OpenAI’s new partnership with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive, he admitted: “You don’t get a new computing paradigm very often.” That’s true, and it’s probably why few people are willing to bet openly on this future. New transformative technology always feels impossible—right up until it becomes unavoidable. The smartphone was once unthinkable, after all. A full-powered computer that fits in your pocket? One that runs apps and connects to a global communication network? The team at General Magic had the core idea and a working prototype nearly 13 years before Steve Jobs took the stage to unveil the first iPhone. Back then, the technology wasn’t ready—and neither was the general public.

That means we’re likely still around 15 years away from what we can call the Great De-Screening. But the shift has already begun, if you know where to look. These days, we text our AI chatbots far less than we actually talk to them out loud. That side button on your iPhone that once launched the notoriously clunky Siri? It now activates ChatGPT’s voice mode for millions of users. Before long, we’ll all subscribe to dedicated personal AI agents, install AI-powered speakers in every room of our homes, and clip AI recording devices to our jackets and bags. Eventually, as both we and our AI tools interact more with the physical world around us, we’ll start to question—and then demand—why advanced AI interfaces aren’t built into every object, everywhere: in our cars, our smart home appliances, at drive-through windows, at tourist information kiosks. There’s a reason we call them chatbots, after all: voice is their killer app.

But just like every past technological shift, it will take one breakthrough consumer product to displace the status quo. And all signs point to OpenAI being the first contender to pull that off—this is their race to lose. Over the past year, Altman has poached dozens of Apple’s top manufacturing and wearable technology experts, and put Jony Ive in charge of the team to work on top-secret new device designs. No one can say for certain what the team is building, but let’s be honest: we can make a pretty good guess. They know what they’re after. The whole team is famously obsessed with the movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Rumor has it Altman even tried, like a modern-day Ursula, to license Johansson’s actual voice for ChatGPT. If Altman wants to dominate the global market and the massive oceans of AI data that come with it, OpenAI needs its own hardware. So yes, whether Scarlett Johansson gives her voice or not, there’s no question his team is hard at work prototyping an anti-smartphone device as we speak: some kind of always-on personal companion, complete with that signature sultry AI voice from the film.

Is it the inconspicuous in-ear device we saw in Her? According to court documents filed as part of an ongoing trademark dispute, no. Apparently it might not even be a wearable at all. That’s honestly a shock to us. With AirPods, Apple’s last great hardware innovation, Apple trained an entire generation to get used to wearing tiny speakers in their ears every day. That means the foundation is already in place for a next-generation, AI-optimized in-ear form factor. Besides, you don’t hire Jony Ive to build something completely from scratch. He’s a master of redesign, not radical reinvention.

Is the idea that we still, somehow, need screens to interact with technology? Apple certainly seems to think that: along with Microsoft, Samsung, and nearly every other big tech company, it’s expanding its smart home product line and adding displays to almost every new device. Meta, meanwhile, is doubling back down on its investment in smart glasses. (It doesn’t matter how “impressive” the newest models are—glasses will never be a universal, everyday device for most people.) Even the novel new Rabbit r1, a voice-first device that doesn’t run traditional apps and is billed as “a move away from the traditional screen-based paradigm” according to one AI CEO, still comes with a touchscreen. Old habits die hard, after all.

The truth is, screens have always been flawed. In an era where the public is divided on almost everything, most people—including 74 percent of teens, per Pew Research—agree that screens do more harm than good. Screens are clunky, a necessary inconvenience, just a temporary stopgap on the way to better interfaces. A few people will always cling to them, but they were never meant to be permanent. The simple reason is that they slow down our interactions with the AI tools that will soon be central to our daily lives.

Just imagine what a post-screen world will feel like. No smudged glass, no cracked displays. No sore texting thumbs, no chronic neck pain from hunching over a handheld device. Video and images won’t be crammed into a 6-inch vertical rectangle—they’ll expand out into the world, beamed directly to our field of vision or projected onto any surface. Every space will be transformed, from the maps we use to navigate to the interiors of our homes and public spaces. If you thought audio tours were boring, just wait for what comes next. The whole world will become an interactive museum, and we’ll be its curious patrons: wandering around, pointing at landmarks, stopping to stare at oddities, completely freed from having to stare down at a pocket device. We’ll talk. We’ll talk nonstop: to our AI tools, to the world around us, to no one in particular, even to ourselves. It will be a fundamentally different way of living.