Zuckerberg and Musk need to answer a question – what is the point ...

As the sun rose on the west coast on Tuesday, before the wildfires began, and as Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement that could change the political landscape forever, an army of robots were preparing to trundle around a Las Vegas hotel. Massage robots, pool cleaning robots, exoskeleton robots, backflipping robot dogs; they had assembled from around the world to demonstrate the future.

They were in Las Vegas – alongside some 140,000 actual people from the tech industry – for the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, probably the world’s most important tech conference. Technology companies bring their latest offerings in an attempt to excite the world and its buyers, showing off everything from new products to speculative concepts. Now nearly 60 years old, CES has served as the introduction of many of the world’s most famous tech products: the first CD player, for instance, and everything from Pong to the Xbox.

In recent years, however, the genuinely exciting products have been joined by an array of solutions to non-existing problems, and a dazzling array of tech for tech’s sake. Increasingly, and this year with clear certainty, the show has become about something more important: the question of what technology actually is for.

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Even amid the glitzy scale of Las Vegas buildings – where a hotel complex can be themed around an entire civilisation and house enough people and entertainment offerings for an entire city – the city’s convention centre is vast. Its size is such that, beginning in 2019, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company drilled a massive warren of tunnels through which Teslas carry attendees. But rising even above that convention centre this week was a question, posed in the form of an ad for BMW.

“TECH HAS NO SOUL,” it shouted. “OR DOES IT?”

Does it? The question seemed to be haunting many of the products that were shown off during the week.

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LG, for instance, seemed to embrace the growing apathy and antipathy towards AI by rebranding it as “affectionate intelligence”. “Good moments shape a good day,” its advertising copy read. “Better days lead to a better life. Wherever you are – at home, at work or on the go – LG ensures everyone can experience a better life beyond bounds and limits, bringing smiles and empathy to our AI.”

The company’s vision seemed to be about giving tech a soul by allowing it to see ours a little better. The home robots had soothing voices, for instance, and if its in-car entertainment system spotted that you were stressed out and your heart rate was high, it would put on relaxing music. If that didn’t soothe your soul enough, then you might opt for one of the many egg-shaped robotic massage chairs that were on offer throughout the conference, or you could adopt a robot dog, “close the distance” with internet-enabled sex toys, or simply envelop yourself in a virtual reality system to tune it all out. (The industry’s focus on stress might be in part a reflection of how anxious many within it are about the threat of upcoming tariffs from Donald Trump.)

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Most of these ideas are conceptual, and as such exist largely for marketing. The real substance is largely about TVs, in keeping with CES’s origins as an audio and visual conference, and television manufacturers came with a variety of new offerings: huge, bendy, bright, transparent. In recent years, however, TV marketing has moved away from what actually shows on the screen to what’s inside it; companies such as Samsung want you to be as interested in the smarts and software as the light-up panel itself. Technology is increasingly about deciding what you see, not how you see it.

Some of the advertising around Las Vegas through the week of the conference seemed to take aim at technology itself, or at least the threat of it subsuming the rest of the world. As travellers left the conference through the Las Vegas airport, they saw vast screens from Delta Air Lines that seemed to promote the idea of getting away from a computer. “The world’s best search engine will always be you,” they read, alongside impressive pictures of travellers seeing the real world.

“We believe we’re in the humanity business. Truly,” says Ranjan Goswami, Delta’s senior vice president for consumer experience design, shortly after the company had held the first ever keynote in the Sphere. “What we also know is that at this scale, even when we carry 500,000-700,000 people a day, people want connection. Of course they want to get there on time, but they also want connection.”

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Delta was probably the headlining event of the world’s most important tech conference, holding its keynote in the world’s most advanced venue. But the message it portrayed was clear: technology is all well and good, but it’s people and experiences that actually matter.

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On Tuesday morning – before Delta had lit up the sphere, and before the wildfires had begun – Mark Zuckerberg made the most consequential and significant technology announcement of the week. He said that Meta would be dramatically relaxing its rules around hateful content, getting rid of fact checkers and asking users to do it instead, and signalling a shift towards Trump-favouring policies that had been long discussed but yet to be realised. It was a reminder, not that it were needed, that the most substantial parts of the technology industry don’t have to do with the chips and motors that were at the heart of CES, but the new world of media and politics that has become entwined with the tech world. Less battery powered, more real power.

Meta did have some presence at the conference – its leaders in artificial intelligence and augmented reality appeared – but Zuckerberg’s video overshadowed them all. And while he did not appear during the event, the video statement cast a shadow over all of that Tuesday and beyond.

Hours after his statement, Linda Yaccarino – the nominal chief executive of X, though it is not clear how much executive power she has over owner Elon Musk – appeared on stage and hailed Zuckerberg’s decision to embrace a “community notes” style of fact checking, which has long been used on her own platform. “We say, Mark, Meta: welcome to the party.”

But, before she could speak, the Consumer Technology Association – which stages the conference – began with an introductory video that hailed the possibilities provided by technology. “What's possible and when technology and humanity intersect, the answer is anything. That's because tech doesn't just solve challenges, it transforms them into opportunities. It helps us move smarter, live healthier, and experience the world in ways we never thought possible,” the video read.

“Tech isn’t just advancing, it’s uniting,” a disembodied voice said.

Then Yaccarino took to the stage and attacked legacy news as being “designed to make you think a certain way” and in a seeming attempt to explain Elon Musk’s inflammatory posts around child sexual exploitation claimed that X was responsible for exposing grooming gangs. The only mention of unity was when she claimed that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, “will be talked about as probably one of the single biggest unifiers that will bring this country together, and it's something we should all be rooting for and really cheering for its success”.

Social media companies have always been accused of fomenting division, of course. But until now that was largely a structural critique that suggested the division itself was an accident: what social networks really wanted to do was keep people engaged, and the best way to do that just happened by amplifying inflammatory content. That philosophy might be traced back to an update to Facebook in 2018, which was aimed at keeping people on the news feed by promoting posts that promoted conversations, but actually ended up highlighting posts that made people argue. By 2021, the world was tired of the kind of arguments that change had promoted, and Meta platforms including Instagram and Facebook both made the decision to deprioritise political content.

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But whether it is was intentional or not, technology quickly became politics: news feeds were increasingly where news happened, and it became harder to distinguish chief executives from politicians. Technology was no longer the kind of thing that happened at CES, and was made out of chips and wires; it is now primarily a system of feeds and algorithms that decide what people see and what they know, and the battle to decide that.

The world has little choice over any of this. Even as Zuckerberg announced the new changes, he seemed to recognise that people didn’t necessarily want them: Meta’s policy head Joel Kaplan recognised that it was done in response to feedback, but said that it had been a “blunt approach”. He pointed to the “people who want to see more” politics in their feeds, and that they now could, but it’s unclear how many of those there are.

But that sense of what people might want out of their technology – and if they want that technology at all – was rarely present as a concern. At Meta, it is about giving people politics whether they want it or not; at CES, it was about giving people robots, AI, and other new ways of doing old things, even if they haven’t asked for it.

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Halfway through the conference, much of Los Angeles was set alight. It is a nearly 300 mile drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and they are divided by a mountain range, but the concern spread quickly among attendees. The thread of disaster reshaped how the exhibitions looked: the advertising from personal temperature tracker Core that showed how it might be useful in a heating world became prescient, the advanced technology for police forces and militaries to quell civil unrest suggested dystopias to come, those people lying in their massage eggs looked more like lotus eaters.

Across the world, on social media, some of the concern turned specifically to AI. Matthew Bernstein, an online social activist who makes easily shareable political infographics for Instagram, posted one such image that linked the emissions of artificial intelligence with the disaster.

“Somewhere, the men who build AI chatbots are selecting the interiors for the rocketships they will use to leave Earth and all of us burning with it,” it read, over a picture of a forest in flames. It pointed to statistics about the vast amount of carbon produced by using or training AI models. It has since been liked almost half a million times.