Stevie Wonder’s Rule for AI at CES 2026—‘Make Life Better for the Living’

Stevie Wonder’s rule for AI at CES: “Make life better for the living”

By Eric Sullivan edited by Seth Fletcher

Of all the incessant talk about artificial intelligence at CES this year, the most useful thing I heard came from Stevie Wonder.

I spotted him moving around the exhibit floor — handlers crowded alongside him, fans moving in and out — and slipped in long enough to ask a few questions. Wonder is not new to this world. He has always viewed technology as part of his job, as something that needs to be shaped, tested and adjusted. Long before AI became a go-to buzzword, he worked with synth pioneers on the sounds that defined songs like “Superstition” and “Living for the City.” He has been attending CES for over a decade.

Wonder has been working on his debut album for over 20 years, so I asked him what he thought about AI in the creative process. He didn’t hesitate. “I won’t let my music be programmed,” he told me. “I’m not going to use it to make myself and make the music that I made.” He did not reject technology. He was protecting what he considers human territory. “We can continue to talk about technology,” he said. But he was preoccupied with another issue. “Let’s see how you can make things better for people in their lives, not to imitate life, but to make life better for the living.”

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Among health technology exhibitors, a common theme emerged: the always-on AI companion, which can help make care decisions, locate services and navigate daily life. Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, told me that people already use Copilot and Bing to ask about 50 million health-related questions. every day.

Yet the promise only seemed more real in smaller tools with clearer stakes, particularly those designed for people who are blind or have limited vision. With accessibility technology, the problem and the benefits seemed obvious.

After a few hours on the ground, a trend emerged. Some of the most compelling accessibility technologies haven’t so much tried to correct vision as to translate the visual world into something usable. EchoVision, a pair of smart glasses from California-based AGIGA, developed with input from Wonder, allows the user to point their head at a sign, door or other object and hear a description about it. In a room full of gadgets that looked like solutions in search of problems, storytelling that made a person’s day easier made sense.

But the description does not always solve the whole problem.

“I’m not sure it does you much good to know that’s where the restrooms are,” a representative for Seattle-based Glidance told me, “if you don’t already have the navigation skills to avoid all the people in the way.” The world is not just an image frozen in time. It’s movement. It’s the crowd. It’s columns, borders, chaos.

Glidance’s answer was Glide, a two-wheeled device that rolled in front of you with an attached handle, much like handlebars on wheels. Stereo cameras spotted obstacles and dangers. The device then steers and brakes to help you continue in the desired direction.

Glidance kept the guide in your hand; .lumen puts it on your forehead. The founder of the Romanian start-up, Cornel Amariei, described his glasses as “a self-driving car that sits on your head”. At CES, the company won an accessibility award in a pitch competition for assistive technology startups, along with a supersized check for $10,000. (“Now we have money for return tickets,” Amariei said.)

Many CES demos relied on bulky sensors. But .lumen kept the hardware of its glasses simple and tried to do the rest with software. Six cameras create stereoscopic vision: a perception of depth constructed from slightly different angles, in the same way that two eyes triangulate a sidewalk. And the team made a key design choice: the glasses don’t require an internet connection. All the math is in the device itself.

Amariei explained that geometry alone is not enough. A lake is perfectly flat. A system that only understands the “flat” will direct you directly there. The hardest part is distinguishing safe surfaces from unsafe surfaces, and then translating that into something your body can use. When the .lumen glasses find a clear route, they do not announce step-by-step directions. They guide you there using haptics, nudging your head towards the open path.

All the sensor talks and demonstrations were fascinating, but the human reward is what stuck with me. These tools are intended to allow someone to move across a hall, down a sidewalk, across a crowded room, without having to stop and reassess every few feet.

The best accessibility technology I saw at CES pushed back on the most annoying habit of the show: making sweeping promises when people need reliable, specific tools. Some of these devices will be very expensive. Some will take longer to mature than their demos suggest. Some will stumble in the real world. But they point in a direction that Stevie Wonder would recognize: tools that make life better for the living.

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