OpenAI wants to free us from our screens. Who's going to tell them?

• We still don't know what kind of device OpenAI and famed designer Jony Ive are working on.
• But we're pretty sure it won't involve a screen.
• A certain kind of tech person thinks screens have been bad for society. Maybe! But getting us to give them up is going to be very, very hard.

ITEM: OpenAI has rolled out a new update that's supposed to make it easier to talk with ChatGPT, using your voice.

ITEM: OpenAI plans to release a mysterious device, created by famed designer Jony Ive. We still don't know much about it except that 1) it likely won't have a screen, and that 2) you will likely interact with it using your voice.

You see where I'm going with this?

Yes, having a better voice interface could help OpenAI right now. But it seems like it will be crucial, in the future, for the yet-to-be-announced Ive device: If that thing doesn't have a screen, then you're going to have to talk to it. So the voice stuff better be up to snuff.

Here's where I'm really going: I'm happy to be wrong about this. But I think any personal computing device, from any company, that doesn't have a screen is going to be a very, very hard sell.

I understand why OpenAI, among other tech companies, is interested in screen-less devices. There are at least two reasons.

• People at OpenAI, and other tech companies, genuinely believe that our dependence on screens — and social media we interact with using screens — is a bad thing. And that we will one day welcome tech that end-runs all of this, and live healthier and happier lives.
• The market for devices with screens is 100% locked up by Apple and Google. If you wanted to convince people to swap out their iPhones or Androids for a device that did something better, or cheaper, it would have to be remarkably better or cheaper to move the needle. There's way more open space with a device that doesn't position itself as a phone competitor, at least for now. (This is parallel to the logic that has led Meta, Google, Apple, and many others to work on glasses and goggles — that field is wide-open, too, even if it's unclear that regular people will ever wear this stuff.)

And I can absolutely believe that there will be some market, of some size, for people who don't want or need screens on their devices. (I asked OpenAI for comment.)

But for the rest of us? The screen isn't a necessary evil we tolerate so we can use our phones. The screen is the whole point.

Without a screen, we can't see the hilarious burn our friend just dropped in the group chat. Without a screen, we can't see the thing we might want to impulse-buy. And most important: Without a screen, we can't use phones for their actual primary use case — entertaining ourselves, slack-jawed, as we watch videos.

I know, I know. You need data to accept a conclusion like this. And sure, I could show you stuff like this report from Ericsson, which says that mobile video accounts for 75% of data transmission these days (and yes, video uses more data than everything else). Or that Meta reported that video time spent on Instagram was up 30% last year alone. Or that there's very compelling evidence that we've stopped reading — so much so that The New York Times is trying to figure out how to reach non-readers, with … video.

But you have also left the house in the last year.

Which means that everywhere you go, you see people watching video on their phones. When they're sitting, when they're standing, inside, outside, on and on. (You can also tell that they're watching video without ever looking at their phone, because everyone has decided that the best way to watch videos on their phones is without headphones. But that's a different old man rant for a different time.)

Imagining a world where people aren't watching MrBeast or Computah or name your favorite thing on a screen isn't impossible.

I used to live in that world: Back before the iPhone, it was very common to see people in public who weren't watching anything at all. Maybe they were listening to an iPod, or a Walkman (yes, old). Maybe they were … reading a newspaper (yes, ancient).

But we also used to churn our own butter in the olden times. We could still do that, if we wanted to. We seem very happy buying butter from a store instead.

So if Sam Altman and Jony Ive want us to use their screenless wondergadget, they're going to have to give us much more incentive than better voice chat. They may have to take our screens from our cold, dead hands.