Introducing the Juicero, Only for Reading

Who remembers the dumbest product ever? Someone has topped it.

Attention Chicago-area readers: On Sunday, March 9th I’ll be making what is, at this time, my only scheduled public appearance in the area to talk about More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI at the Barrington White House. I’ll also be talking about being “The Biblioracle,” and offering some thoughts about what I think books and writing look like in the future. Come join the fun! Click the link below for more info.

Who remembers the Juicero Press?

Of course you don’t remember the Juicero Press; why should anyone remember the Juicero Press? You just see that word…Juicero…and you’re already thinking, whatever that is, I don’t need to know about that because clearly it is nonsense and I have better things to do with my time.

The Juicero was a consumer kitchen device designed to take proprietary, single-use bags of fruits and vegetables, and squeeze them into juice. It also connected to the Internet via an app for some reason that has never been clear to me. The Juicero Press was priced $699 at launch in March 2016.

While you know and I know that something called the Juicero Press that squeezes proprietary, single-use bags of produce into juice and is for some reason connected to the internet via an app is a dumb idea, some Silicon Valley venture capitalists thought it was worth investing $120 million into something that squeezes proprietary, single-use bags of produce into juice and is, for some reason, connected to the internet via an app.

(Related: See Audrey Watters’s newsletter this week: “If you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart?”)

The sales prospects for the Juicero Press were undercut by a price which made it incredibly expensive, and also by the fact that journalists found that if you took that proprietary, single use bags of produce and squeezed them with a common and less costly technology known as your hands, you got the same quality of juice output.

Juicero went kaput and became, in the words of Sam Levin, “something of a symbol of the absurd Silicon Valley startup industry that raises huge sums of money for solutions to non-problems.”

In the spirit of Juicero, I would like to introduce you to “Mark.”

Mark is a bookmark, made out of titanium that when you slip into in to your book and tell it what page you’re on, will communicate with the cloud in order to generate “intelligent summaries” of what you’ve read - presumably to help remind you of what happened where you left off. They also have plans for a connected community of readers sharing what and how much they’ve read saying, “Just like Strava keeps you motivated in fitness, Mark keeps you inspired in reading.”

Mark will cost $130. I’m sorry, $129.

The bookmark I was using on the trip out to San Francisco and back I made to speak to the fine folks as the California Writing Project at their pre-convention convention was free with the overpriced bottle of water I purchased at the airport before my flight.

My other free bookmarks include the jacket flap on a hardcover or folding the corner of the page page down on a paperback. I have a great way to track what I’ve read in my home called “a bookshelf,” and for being “motivated” by how much other people are reading, I don’t even know what to say about that. When I need to remember something about a book or have a thought I want to file away for later I use the technology of “pen” and “book margin,” or in some cases “notebook” or “word processing document.”

Maybe I’m out of touch and Mark will be a sensation changing the way people relate to books, and I’m sure some folks with disposable income will buy it to experience the novelty, but seriously, what are we doing here?

Mark is the intersection of “the internet of things” of which Juicero is the nadir, “gamification,” where we are induced to see our daily activities through the lens of tracking and rewards, and “AI for everything,” which is part of a desperate search for a consumer product that will justify the gabillion dollars that are going into developing the technology.

Things are not going well on that front. OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 has been labeled “a lemon,” costing much more to train and run while exhibiting worse performance than existing models, including some of OpenAI’s own. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits that as of yet, the technology has induced, at best, very small gains in overall productivity.

Generative AI is proving incredibly useful in a domains like medical research, coding, industrial design, and other areas requiring understanding the implications of vast amounts of data or running lots and lots of simulations to better understand a problem, but perhaps we should consider that as a consumer product, it has very limited utility, and the utility it does have demands that we humans give up our humanity to the technology.

I argued previously that AI boosters think we’re dumb…

…but products like Mark, or to buy into the entire world view of Reid Hoffman’s Superagency also requires us to be quite literally thoughtless, as though our minds are a kind of void where our experiences cannot have meaning unless they are attached to technology that tracks and “analyzes” it. Hoffman’s utopian future essentially assumes that we’re too out of touch with our own lives to understand them. Look at the example of the benefits of allowing AI to monitor every aspect of his existence and tell me that we’re not looking at a Juicero.

What concerns me is that we’ve already normalized this sort of thinking in so many domains. In education, the learning management system has essentially become a surveillance and tracking tool where administrators, teachers, and even students put more stock in what the data reveals (or doesn’t) than what students have to say about their experiences of school. If the LMS data says a student is chugging along, fulfilling all the educational transactions, then it’s all good, I guess. Never mind if the student is anxious, depressed, and dreading whatever is next.

Mark is claiming that they can enhance your reading experience, but this is (sorry mom) bullshit. Reading needs no enhancing. If you pick up a book that you haven’t been engaged with for a time going back to remind yourself of what you previously experienced is not a hassle or an inefficiency, it’s another experience!

AI is not intelligence. It’s automation. For a consumer facing AI application to be successful, it must automate some aspect of our life’s experience. I’m open to the idea that doing so may be of some benefit in some cases, but companies like OpenAI and Anthropic intend to get us to automate our lives in toto. This is their dream of AGI (artificial generative intelligence), an application that does everything better than humans, so presumably humans don’t have to do anything anymore.

I still cannot wrap my head around why anyone thinks this would be a good thing when it comes the well-being of humanity.

I think Mark is going to flop. I hope it flops because it will be a reassuring sign that humans still value experiences over automation, that our lives don’t need to be tracked, gamified, or analyzed.

Life should be lived.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune this week I air my frustration that Oprah beat me to the punch in being the first to publicly proclaim the significant virtues of Eric Puchner’s Dream State.

At Inside Higher Ed I looked at the hard truth, which is for these AI developers to become profitable, they’re going to be taking our jobs. Teachers are among the first in their crosshairs.

This looks very interesting. Everyone knows about the annual volume of Best American Short Stories, but have you heard of the Coolest American Stories of the year? (via

Christine Sneed

)

At his newsletter,

Mike Caulfield

asks, “Why are we sucking history through a straw?”

I think because I have no sense of how to design something, I’m especially fascinated with how the designer’s brain works.

Nathaniel Roy

walks us through what happens when he designs a book-related logo. (Seriously, consider how rich this experience is versus settling for some image generator AI slop.)

This piece from my friends at

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

by Talia Argondezzi hits a little close to home, “Changes Our University is Making to Pre-Comply With Future Regulations.”

Recommendations

I’m sure I’ve missed or misplaced some requests, but the only ones I see in the inbox are earmarked for my Tribune column. Since that’s the case, I’m going to recommend to everybody the book I read while I was on my trip to California,

Ruth Franklin

’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank.

I just filed my review of the book for next week’s Tribune column, but 600 words does not do it justice. I think this book is a true masterpiece, and should become an all-time classic.

Please do get your request for reading recommendations in for next week’s newsletter.

I did my first bookstore event for More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI at San Francisco’s Book Passage, and while the audience was not huge, they were very engaged and we filmed it for possible airing on CSPAN, so that was kind of exciting.

People who read the book seem to be digging it. You might too.

Got some really good bonus content coming this week or maybe next, so look forward that. In the meantime, don’t forget to be human.

JW
The Biblioracle