This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.theage.com.au/technology/in-trump-s-america-smart-robots-and-ai-mask-an-uncomfortable-future-20260102-p5nr6x.html
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
Las Vegas, Nevada – The very first thing you discover at CES, the world’s largest tech present, is how seamlessly every thing is meant to work. The televisions anticipate what you wish to watch. The robotic vacuums know the place you left the breakfast cereal. The Lego bricks now speak to one another.
The second factor you discover, checking your telephone between press conferences, is {that a} 37-year-old lady was shot lifeless by an immigration agent in Minneapolis, bushfires are raging throughout Victoria and US federal troops have captured the president of Venezuela.
This yr’s CES in Las Vegas was outlined as a lot by what was outdoors the convention halls – the tariffs, the violence, the overwhelming volatility – as what was on present inside.
The battle on your lounge
CES 2026 was a shopper know-how commerce present wearing synthetic intelligence clothes – each firm is now spruiking AI, even firms that haven’t any actual proper to be.
The dazzling devices had been overshadowed by the financial realities of Trump 2.0, nonetheless. The Consumer Technology Association – the organisation that runs the present – launched studies throughout the present indicating tariffs might enhance smartphone costs by 31 per cent, laptops by 34 per cent, and online game consoles by as a lot as 69 per cent.
Every product announcement carried an unstated asterisk about what it would truly value.
The Korean giants went face to face regardless: Samsung unveiled its mammoth 130-inch Micro RGB show. LG countered with its OLED evo W6 “Wallpaper” TV – concerning the width of a ballpoint pen. Both are betting on Micro RGB know-how – a shift from blue-and-white backlights to pink, inexperienced and blue micro-LEDs producing dramatically richer color. If you’ve puzzled why your tv doesn’t seize what your eyes see in actual life, that is the reply the trade is proposing.
“Big screens are no longer the exception; they’re the expectation,” Samsung Australia’s Simon Howe stated. Australia stays a top-10 market globally for premium televisions per capita – we love our screens even when budgets are tight.
Hisense expanded its RGB MiniLED vary with the UR Series, bringing premium show know-how to accessible value factors. The firm’s partnership with French audio specialists Devialet continues, and for players, 180Hz refresh charges promise aggressive benefit.
Your AI assistant can advocate what to observe subsequent. It can’t clarify why the world outdoors your lounge grows extra risky.
The new TVs will undoubtedly be common regionally however what stood out most wasn’t the {hardware}. It’s the insistence that synthetic intelligence have to be embedded in every thing.
Samsung, LG and Hisense every spruiked new AI options filled with promise. Tony Brown, LG’s tv lead, made the pitch I heard all week: AI processes your content material for optimum image high quality, scales up low-definition YouTube clips and navigates streaming abundance. Samsung’s “Visual AI Companion” allows you to question sports activities statistics mid-game.
Yet the relentless AI branding nonetheless sits someplace between precise innovation and a advertising arms race. After the pandemic drove a wave of TV upgrades, many customers might be able to improve once more this yr, notably forward of the FIFA World Cup. Questions about image high quality, dimension and value will nonetheless in all probability be extra necessary than whether or not your TV can let you know which actor you’re .
Lego’s shock
The most novel announcement wasn’t from a tech firm in any respect. Lego unveiled Smart Play, which the corporate calls its largest innovation in 50 years.
Eight years in improvement, the system embeds subtle electronics into normal bricks. A chip smaller than a LEGO stud combines sensors, microphones and computing right into a 2×4 footprint. These good bricks kind a “decentralised computing network” – fashions constructed by completely different youngsters can work together with out prior connection.
Futurist Sally Dominguez, observing from the present ground, famous that purely digital AI merchandise gave guests “a really boring time walking around”, however when digital applied sciences create hybrid bodily experiences, merchandise can actually sing.
Literally, within the case of Lego. The Lego demonstration drew viewers pleasure – and even some gasps – in ways in which one other barely slimmer laptop computer merely couldn’t.
Julia Goldin, the corporate’s chief advertising officer, framed it as shopper pushed moderately than know-how pushed. “This innovation came through understanding how kids play,” she stated in an interview. The platform extends bodily play time, encourages storytelling and crucially doesn’t require a display or energy button. Children can merely begin taking part in.
The first Star Wars units might be launched in March. Futurist Mark Pesce famous his hope that the system allowed unstructured play moderately than constraining creativeness to pre-programmed interactions. We’ll see.
The ‘zero-labour’ residence
The broader theme was home liberation by means of robotics. LG demonstrated CLOiD, an AI-powered residence robotic representing the corporate’s imaginative and prescient of bringing intelligence from screens into the bodily world.
The timeline for Australian houses? “A few years away”, however the route is obvious. Samsung’s AI good kitchens and laundry home equipment equally level to a choreless future.
More instantly, Ecovacs showcased robotic vacuums with 30,000 pascals of suction and “perpetual runtime” batteries that fast-charge throughout cleansing pit stops. The firm leads the Australian market and is integrating AI stain detection that identifies dried ketchup, sprays it, waits, then cleans. “You should be able to just decide that you want your floor cleaned, your windows cleaned, and let us take care of that,” says Karen Powell, Ecovacs’ Australian head.
Where was Australia?
Walking the ground, you encounter nationwide pavilions from South Korea, France and Israel. They are co-ordinated presences the place startups cluster beneath a standard flag, making it simpler for patrons and traders to search out them. Australia, conspicuously, had nothing.
Dr Catherine Ball, a futurist who tracks the present, argues this represents a structural hole with very actual prices. She says CES is among the few locations the place patrons, traders, companions and media converge at scale – the place a startup can transfer from “nice demo” to “let’s pilot this” in a single week. Australian founders hustle alone, making our IP more durable to find, more durable to belief and simpler to miss.
She says which means fewer heat introductions, fewer conversations about distribution and fewer visibility in rooms the place shortlists get written and awards doled out. A co-ordinated “Team Australia” sales space would create a single entrance door for startups, she says.
It’s an affordable query whether or not Australia’s innovation ambitions are critical or merely rhetorical. We speak about turning into a know-how exporter whereas leaving our entrepreneurs to navigate the world’s largest innovation present with out institutional assist.
The uncomfortable reality
As is commonly the case for the tech sector, CES exists in a bubble. Its 140,000 attendees had been sealed off from actuality in windowless conference centres. The overarching theme of the present was about making life simpler and higher, by means of AI, good robots and greater and brighter tv units.
Yet on the identical day we watched demonstrations of robotic companions designed to get rid of loneliness, an ICE agent shot a girl by means of her windshield, simply a few days after US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a navy operation and flew him to New York.
CES guarantees a world the place your tv understands your preferences, the place good LEGO bricks create new dimensions of play. The know-how is spectacular.
But this frictionless, AI-powered future is a jarring one, one being marketed to Australian customers alongside a gift the place unarmed residents are being shot in residential streets and international leaders are extracted by navy drive, whereas bushfires rage again residence. Your AI assistant can advocate what to observe subsequent. It can’t clarify why the world outdoors your lounge grows extra risky.
The robots don’t know, both. They simply hold cleansing.
David Swan travelled to Las Vegas with assist from Samsung, LG, Hisense and Lego.
The Business Briefing publication delivers main tales, unique protection and knowledgeable opinion. Sign as much as get it each weekday morning.
David Swan is the know-how editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was beforehand know-how editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect by way of Twitter or electronic mail.From our companions
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.theage.com.au/technology/in-trump-s-america-smart-robots-and-ai-mask-an-uncomfortable-future-20260102-p5nr6x.html
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
