A few weeks ago, Las Vegas hosted my favorite show of the year: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Every January, I hatch elaborate plans with my sixteen-year-old, tech-obsessed son about how we might sneak in. Unfortunately, CES requires proof not only that you work in tech but also that you’re important in tech. I’ve tried. We are not.
Still, CES is my annual reminder that artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a source of existential dread. It is also playful, inventive, and occasionally delightful. I get to take off my black hat of dystopian doom—at least for a moment. But the hat never goes far. Innovation is moving at breakneck speed, and forward planning is limping along behind it—sadly, often far out of sight. Without more deliberate thinking about consequences, scale, and feedback loops, the gap between “can we build this?” and “should we?” only widens.
This year’s show was overwhelmingly AI-forward. The gaming rigs and televisions were still there, of course, but they felt more like familiar background scenery than the headline act. Lisa Su of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) pointed out that ChatGPT has grown from one million users in 2022 to over one billion today, with predictions of five billion by 2028. Compute demand has exploded a hundredfold in just three years and is set to rise another ten thousand times by the end of the decade. The infrastructure story is astonishing—but it’s the human story underneath it that interests me more.
On the keynote stages, the language was strikingly human-centered. Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing described AI as a tool for “augmenting, elevating, and maximizing human potential.” Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Technology Association framed CES as the place where “technology meets community, business, and policy,” while Lisa Su emphasized partnership across the ecosystem to “bring AI everywhere, for everyone.” Across the board, the message was less about machines replacing people than about progress as a shared, collective project, with clear references to social responsibility.
So, how well did the exhibited products live up to that promise?
The Fun, the Useful, and the Slightly Unhinged
Screens pretending not to be screens
LG’s 9mm “Wallpaper TV” melts into the wall, while its Art TV can rotate through 4,500 masterpieces or generate new ones with AI. Inkposter and Fraimic push the digital frame further, with e-paper displays that mimic real texture and, in Fraimic’s case, voice-to-art creation via OpenAI. Interestingly, Fraimic was founded by artists who see AI as collaborator rather than thief.
Smart homes that may be smarter than us
Deadbolts opened with wrist scans. Refrigerators that swing open when your hands are full. And my personal favorite: Ikea’s $10 Kallsup speaker—three inches square, surprisingly loud, and able to sync with up to one hundred other speakers. For the price of a meal out, you can create a house-wide rave, which is either a design feature or a threat.
Why does this exist?
The Lollipop Star uses bone conduction to play music through your teeth while you suck on candy—“a universe where taste meets sound.” Dreame’s Halo hairdryer is a floor lamp that dries your hair while you are watching television and then returns to function as a floor lamp afterward. GLYDE’s AI-powered clippers promise a salon cut in ten minutes, provided you don’t slice through the bizarre headband you are required to wear.
Health and wellness: genuinely promising—yet complicated
TouchPoint Solution’s Thodian tokens vibrate to calm anxiety when your smartwatch senses stress. Y-Brush Halo analyzes breath biomarkers while you brush. NuraLogix’s Longevity Mirror claims to estimate physiological age from facial blood flow. These could be incredibly meaningful—but when some of these companies talk about “unlocking new models for health insurance programs” in the same breath, the power imbalance becomes obvious. The data flows one way, the premiums another.
Robots on the march
Robovacs now map rooms in 3D, avoid hundreds of objects, vacuum and mop the floor—then even clean their own mops—and, in Roborok’s case, sprout little chicken legs to climb stairs. LG’s CLOiD home robot can wash and fold laundry—slowly—but it signals progress toward a single do-everything helper. And Strutt’s all-terrain smart wheelchair, reviewed movingly by YouTuber Zack Nelson, looks genuinely life-changing: the same tech as autonomous cars, finally applied to mobility.
Pets, real and otherwise
Feeders that sanitize bowls, robots that entertain dogs and film social-media reels for their owners to share, and AI companion pets that are either adorable or the first act of a Black Mirror episode. I remain undecided—and slightly loyal to the analog dog.
The Ones That Kept Me Awake
Razer’s Motoko AI headset places cameras on the earcups, giving a natural point of view and longer battery life than AI glasses. But the recording indicator is tiny. The privacy problem isn’t your data— it’s everyone else’s.
Vibe Bot, a cheerful nine-inch-tall assistant, sits in meetings and listens to everything that is said, taking notes, answering questions and rotating its camera to track speakers. And Radiance, from Project Mirage, is a meeting controller that scans your calendar for upcoming meetings and video links, transcribes the full meeting for you (with a summary at the end), and even has a voice modulation feature to change your voice as you speak, presumably to make you sound more energetic and engaged if you are having an off day. These are useful and clever technologies, but there are clearly unresolved ethical issues.
Most unsettling for me was VHEX Lab’s SITh.XRaedo grief platform, which turns a photo of a deceased loved one into a speaking avatar for “final conversations,” giving closure by allowing you to say those last things you never got the chance to say. It won a digital health award. I can imagine therapeutic uses—and also a thousand ways this could go wrong.
Of course, all of these innovations are created with good intentions. Yet good intentions don’t prevent unintended consequences—some clear from the start, others visible only after millions of people adopt a product—and they certainly don’t prevent bad actors from finding their own uses.
So, Did CES Match Its Own Rhetoric?
Much of what I saw was joyful, clever, or genuinely helpful. Some was trivial. A few pieces were alarming. Innovation should be fun—and CES is undeniably fun. But responsibility isn’t the opposite of excitement; it’s the condition for it. If we want technology that truly augments human potential, we need more than dazzling demos. We need designers, companies, and consumers willing to ask uncomfortable questions before the product ships, not after the lawsuit lands.
As I scrolled online through the endless gadgets, three slightly different questions followed me around the show floor—less abstract than usual, more tangled up with what I’d just seen:
- Not can we build this, but who gains power from it—and who quietly loses it?
Consider longevity mirrors that feed insurers information or devices that know more about our bodies than we do. - Not is it efficient, but what forms of judgment, memory, or effort does it outsource?
Consider meeting bots that remember so we don’t have to and smart homes that smooth away every small friction that used to teach us how to cope. - Not will it sell, but have the people being recorded, analyzed, or simulated truly consented?
Consider headsets with barely visible cameras, digital avatars of the dead, and assistants that sit silently in the corner and listen.
I couldn’t help noticing that many of the loudest evangelists on the keynote stages were people who had already done the hard yards—who had learned to think, write, organize, and struggle without AI. For them, these tools are enhancement. For my children, they may become the starting line. A life engineered to be easier is not automatically a life that is better, wiser, or more resilient.
CES is a carnival of possibility, and I genuinely love it for that. But possibility needs a companion: a willingness to ask what kind of humans we are shaping while we shape the machines. I’ll keep dreaming about getting those elusive tickets—and I’ll keep packing my black hat, just in case.
Still, beyond my own worries and wonder, I’m curious what landed with you: these are just my standouts. The Verge, Wired, and others have many more. Which gadgets made you pause—and which would you secretly take home?
Alexandra Frye
Alexandra Frye edits the Tech & Society series, where she brings philosophy into conversations about tech and AI. With a background in advertising and a master’s in philosophy focused on tech ethics, she now works as a responsible AI consultant and advocate.
