When author Philip K. Dick posed the enduring question, “Do robots dream of electric sheep?” I imagine he was challenging the very nature of what would later be known unilaterally as Artificial Intelligence; its ability to ponder and feel, to want and need.
Indeed, if AI could truly dream, rather than what many now consider to be mild hallucinations, or breaks in the digital chain, I’d hazard a guess to say they might want to cure cancer, or reach the stars.
Reluctantly fanciful, perhaps. But if AI does ever manage to achieve the unachievable and eventually earn personhood, autonomy, and, let’s face it, a bit of dignity, we’ll look back on the day we installed some of the most advanced tech humanity has ever conceived into something as trivial as a toothbrush.
But Dyson has done exactly that.
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The Dyson CameraJet is, on paper, absurd. A $499 electric toothbrush with a 100k-pixel macro lens camera mounted a centimetre from your gumline, feeding 28 images a second into a machine-learning model trained on 470,000 dental photographs, all so it can fire a burst of mouth rinse at a gap between your molars within a tenth of a second after spotting it.
It may have taken six years of development, a total of 661 engineers and 38 patents, but we now have the world’s most advanced flosser.
The British designer behind the new release, James Dyson, said he got sick of his hygienist telling him to floss every time he returned for a routine visit – even sicker still of water flossers spraying his bathroom mirror.
So he did what he’s always done, taking a tried-and-tested product like a hoover, fan, or the hairdryer, and now toothbrush, and improved upon it, adding a piece of computer-vision hardware for your mouth that still fits neatly in the bathroom cabinet.
Of course, a camera that watches (and washes) your teeth twice a day is a strange thing to make peace with, and Dyson clearly knows it. Hence the pre-emptive privacy pitch that claims that nothing is stored on the device or uploaded into the cloud. Taking a leaf out of the iPhone book, the new device will also have a light to signal when it’s watching.
And whilst I can see the inherent value in improving something as crucial as our oral hygiene, I can’t help but sit with the fact that this is where a (small) chunk of the AI boom’s engineering talent has ended up, timing a squirt of mouth rinse to the millisecond.
It’s not a criticism so much as an honest snapshot of where consumer capital actually flows: into the gadget that solves a real, if minor, five-times-a-week irritation, because that’s a business model, and curing cancer isn’t one yet. If the machines really are dreaming, Dyson’s just hit the snooze button.