Most people do not have a camera installed in their bedrooms, pointing at their beds, watching them sleep. Most people would not feel comfortable with a camera pointed at themselves while they slept. But how small would cameras have to get before people were comfortable with it?

There are two types of costs when people evaluate technology. The first is the monetary cost. The second is the integration cost. The integration cost isn’t an amount of money, it’s all of the small things—the weight of your phone in your pocket, the speed the website takes to load, the size of the camera.

I like to imagine what the world would be like the capabilities of our current technological systems remained fixed, if we used them for the same purposes, but we lowered the costs to nothing. What if the iPhone 50 launch included the announcement that there would be people on the street corner passing out the new iPhone for free. What if the iPhone 50 was paper thin and never had to be recharged. This isn’t a standard Sci-Fi scenario because the iPhone 50 still runs the same apps and does the same things. All we’ve changed is the cost.

Cost is fundamentally a technological problem. With sufficient technological improvements any kid can buy a build-your-own-iPhone kit for $2 from Amazon. (I don’t think intellectual property law would be a sufficient deterrent if the underlying technology was widespread.)

But this hypothetical is more interesting to run with a new and unfamiliar technology like AI. What if access to AI had no cost? I don’t mean interested into every app like it is today. I mean integrated into every product. I’m eating a bowl of rice at my local Vietnamese place and they have free napkins and a forks and hand sanitizer. What if they had dispenser for nickel-sized AI buttons that you could grab for free, and ask questions of the LLM contained inside?

I think it would force people to care less about AI. People would literally throw their LLMs and iPhones in the trash can after a single use. I think it would be harder to argue whether AI is good or bad, it would just be there, like a napkin or a fork. You would have kids in the future who expect LLMs in their McDonald’s toys and who expect the cross walk button to carry on a conversation instead of repeating one voiceline (“light is on to cross…”).

What if cameras were the size and cost of a grain of rice? There’s a security camera in here of course. But just one, in the corner. If cameras cost a fraction of a cent, would there be one in every corner? Would there be one built in to my bowl of rice? Would I be able to see them if they were the size of a grain of rice? Would it bother me less? “Of course there’s a camera pointing at me, there’s always a dozen cameras pointed at me.” There’s a camera in my phone pointed at my face as I type this but that one doesn’t bother me. It’s probably because it’s not recording me, or maybe because it’s mine, but maybe it’s because it’s small enough that I forget it’s even there. Many people sleep with a camera in their bedroom.

I like this hypothetical because a lot of people object to technology because of the integration costs. AI is an environmental problem, I don’t want to recharge my watch every night, etc. but those are problems that may be solved. And those objections avoid doing the hard work of asking “should we?” When evaluating technology it’s important to look beyond cost and determine what you actually want your life and your world to look like.