AI:: Low Spark, High Stakes

CES is where the future tested on humans. AI is arriving the same way, but with much higher stakes.

Author

Connie Connors
January 26, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Vision Pieces: Selling a World, Not a Product

AI is arriving through that same pipeline — show it, ship it, refine it — but with a fundamental difference. The stakes aren’t novelty or even sales. They’re decisions, labor, privacy, and knowledge: the invisible infrastructure of everyday life.

Consumer electronics wraps new ideas in play, fashion, novelty, and delight because our brains adopt what we can feel. Most of these experiments aren’t meant to succeed. That’s not failure, it’s method.

A LEGO x Crocs collaboration might be momentary. The point isn’t whether you and I will buy them; the point is that the market is constantly running small tests of identity, comfort, and status, seeing what people will actually welcome into their lives. (I’m passing on this one…)

Tech companies learned this language and expanded it. They began making vision narratives that weren’t product demos so much as cultural proposals.

  • Apple’s “1984” wasn’t about specs. It was about who you become by buying into the Apple worldview.

  • Microsoft and others made “future of…” films, soft prototypes of daily life. I still remember one: Bill Gates reading a newspaper on a tablet sitting on a park bench. At the time it was speculative sizzle. A decade later, it felt obvious.

The sizzle wasn’t fluff. It was market research. A vision video is a cheap way to test: Do people want this future? Does it scare them? Does it feel inevitable?

From Audience to Participant

Today, companies don’t just test interest with videos. They test it with reality.

Increasingly, the consumer becomes part of R&D.

A lollipop that plays music through your jaw sounds ridiculous — until it teaches the mainstream what bone-conduction feels like. Then that same technology shows up somewhere sane: helmets, hearing accessibility, safety gear, kid-friendly audio.

CES products are famously 80% “this will never exist,” 15% “niche,” and 5% “this changes everything.” That’s the evolutionary mechanism.

From Novelty to Infrastructure

Tech companies absorbed the low-sparks playbook. They moved from building products to selling futures — narratives about how life could work.

Now the pipeline is tighter than ever: Story → prototype → release → feedback → refinement.

That’s why AI feels different from past waves of technology. It isn’t arriving as a finished invention. It’s arriving as a living system: trained, normalized, and adjusted in public.

Reality

If CES is where the future flirts, reality is where it gets quietly installed. Take the Mac Mini.

Think beyond Alexa: a local assistant that quietly handles real work. Not demos. Not toys. Actual AI models. Actual automation. On a machine that looks deliberately ordinary.

Mac Mini available now at Apple stores and other outlets for >$500

But here’s the part that matters: you don’t get this power without friction. You have to configure it =>1 hour. You have to understand just enough to make choices or you give up.

This is how AI is really entering everyday life. Not as magic. Not as sizzle. But as capability that demands participation.

That’s a very different consumer moment than a LEGO x Crocs collaboration. And a much higher-stakes one.

What This Looks Like Now

  • Power is moving closer to the individual, but not without cost. Local AI means more control — and more responsibility.

  • Products are shipping before the norms exist on how they should be used, governed, or trusted.

  • Understanding is optional until it isn’t. You can ignore how something works until you need to configure, fix or explain it.

  • Most people won’t go deep. A small number will. And they’ll quietly shape everyone else’s experience.

Consumer electronics trained us to adopt without understanding.
AI is asking us to decide how much understanding we’re willing to reclaim.

Low sparks help us imagine what’s possible.
High stakes emerge when those possibilities become ordinary.

Until Next Time

Stay curious. Imagine a little, because almost is often enough.

Connie