Hi there, writing from an unpleasant seating area in an unpleasant airport as I await the flight that might just take me home. It’s not the flight I was supposed to take. That one left about four hours ago, without me of course. With any luck, I’ll get home while there’s still some weekend left, but the travel gods have not been kind to me lately, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

Since my last note I took a few weeks off to tour the Japanese countryside with my better half. We had a mostly wonderful time, which I’ll be sharing a bit more on in a future update, and part of the reason why I had such a good time was because I did my damndest to completely ignore my phone while I was away.

After reading a Washington Post piece on the benefits of even short-term digital detoxing (gift link here), I’ve been actively trying to break the cycle of reaching for my phone whenever I have a spare moment, getting back into the pattern of gazing around idly instead of tapping and swiping and sharing.

The results have been surprising. I constantly found thinking it was later than it actually was, that the days were going by more slowly. I was more engaged and happier and having more fun whilst wandering through rural Japan, even when I was walking around in sopping wet shoes thanks to my failure to pack appropriately.

Happy to share more on my developing process there if there’s interest, but before moving on to this week’s links, I’ll just encourage you to give it a shot. Forget timers, forget daily limits, just try a little time away from your phone. I think you’ll like it.

Semi-intelligent, questionably sentient agents are invading new car infotainment screens like a plague, providing occasionally helpful, generally accurate suggestions. I’m hardly an AI zealot, but I confess I’m actually seeing in-car AI as a useful feature in many cases. But what about AI designing new cars?

That’s not exactly what’s happening, but the agentic wave is absolutely cresting over new-car design. For The Verge, I spoke with experts at several companies to get a sense of how AI is shaping that process. For the most part, AI is contributing to reduce the traditional five-plus year design cycle for a new car, helping manufacturers better surf the increasingly chaotic global waves of trade.

For now, the humans are very much at the reins, but it’s only a matter of time before some manufacturer rolls out an AI-shaped concept, probably something with a vestigial fifth wheel hanging off the rear or a pair of headlights not quite pointed in the same direction.

If you’re more into listening than reading, you can catch my thoughts on the latest episode of The Vergecast.

I love all sorts of speculative fiction, but I have a particular affinity for stuff with dystopian or post-apocalyptic angles. A significant portion of that former category takes place in corporate worlds where things sure seem awfully nice, but give the surface a little fingernail scratch and you see some horrors lurking underneath.

I couldn’t help picking up vibes from both subgenres whilst wandering through Toyota’s Woven City, a proto tech utopia that has the potential to be a privacy nightmare. I counted eight cameras at one intersection, all connected to and monitored by an AI-based system Toyota is planning to license to other businesses and municipalities. The promise of those cameras is to create city streets that can warn passing cars about kids chasing balls or runaway baby strollers, and yet the demonstrations I saw in Japan spent more time identifying shoplifters in stores and automatically tracking them across multiple cameras.

The overall off vibe wasn’t helped by streets that seemed completely bereft of residents. I spoke with a few, preselected people who live there, but I didn’t see anyone wandering the pristine sidewalks, didn’t spot a single pup watering the immaculate gardens, and didn’t hear a single kid playing.

I did, though, see some impressive technology, like a rolling robot that helps non-autonomous cars drive autonomously and a three-wheeled, leaning scooter that looked like a total blast to ride. If Toyota can keep this place focused on that kind of tech and maybe dial down the Big Brother stuff a smidge, this could turn out to be a genuinely fascinating experiment.

The presence of some real-life human beings in there might also liven up the joint, but it’s still early days.

That’s all from me this week. I’m still trying to get home from Spain, where I spent a few days getting familiar with Volvo’s upcoming EX60 SUV. It’s an all-electric crossover that looks great and is set to face off against BMW’s iX3 and Mercedes-Benz’s electric GLC later this year. Sadly, that’s about all I can tell you about it for now, but stay tuned for more. Until next time, be good and do well.

p.s. I did finally get home, a mere 10 hours later than scheduled.

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