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- You should put a dog in the front seat and then see what happens then. (upbeat music) Welcome to "Outside the Fox," where we explore what's happening online and why it matters. I'm Kim Horcher. - I'm Steve Flavin. And it's February. We are fully settled in to 2026. For me personally, it's not really the new year until Lunar New Year anyways. So. - Sure. Yes, I agree with that. - You know, it's just like a little bit of buffer between the holidays and when you really have to get it together. But today we're gonna be looking ahead to 2026 and the trends that we've seen that are percolating.
And Kim went to CES in January and is gonna tell us a little bit about that. - Oh my gosh. There is so much going on at CES. I thought Comic-Con was a big convention. No, CES is much bigger. Several different convention centers are fully booked out and places that aren't convention centers too. Just everywhere. And there's a lot to wade through. There's a lot of stuff that seems like it's good technology, but it's actually not so much there yet. And there's some genuine gems out there.
- Yep. We call that vaporware. Not to be confused with vaporwave- - Which is a vibe. - Which is a vibe, and I'm all about it. Well, there's a lot happening in tech in 2026. So we're gonna break it down into three areas in this episode. We're gonna be talking about wellness tech. We're gonna talk about autonomous vehicles. And then we're gonna talk about robots as in humanoid robots that have been popping up in my feed.
I wasn't at CES to see them in person, but I don't know. It's a trend. It's a thing. - You're fine. - Well, why don't we just get into it? So let's talk about wellness tech. It's been around for a while. It feels like something is shifting this year. We're moving into more wearable territory. I think that there's, generally speaking, this kind of desire in the industry to find the next big thing. - Right. But we had a lot of wearables this year. I mean, we've had smartwatches for a while, which track your steps, track your sleep, track how many calories you burn, approximately.
Nothing is really that accurate, I think. And I saw a lot of glucose, hydration monitoring. I accidentally walked into the urine testing booth, which I don't know if I wanna go that far. - That's a trend I've been seeing pop up on my feed. I have not clicked on the articles because I'm like, I don't want that to influence what I've recommended in the future. But it seems like folks are really excited to measure all kinds of biological functions. - I mean, it can be helpful. Do I think it's helpful for everyone? No. Everything? Maybe not.
- It does raise some privacy questions in terms of what types of data these devices are collecting about your metabolism, your biology. I think it's good to remind ourselves we should know what we're signing up for. I will note we used to produce a buyer's guide every year called Privacy Not Included. We haven't updated it in a while, but we do have the archive that's still up. And a lot of wearables, I would say the vast majority of wearables have some pretty creepy things that you're agreeing to in the terms of service.
If you really drill down into what exactly they're collecting and how they can use it, the permissions that you're granting them. So just a reminder to always be vigilant when it comes to any data, but especially your biological data. Right. Because I don't think people think about that necessarily. They're seduced by a cool device and then they'll just buy it. And what are you going to do? Not accept the terms and conditions, then you bricked the thing you just bought. - Right. - So I think it's definitely. I mean, when we're looking at our apps even on our phones, a lot of them sometimes work with analytical companies
and sometimes they sell data and sometimes they might wind up in hands that you might not appreciate them in. And it could affect you. So it's definitely something to think about more, which is. I mean, I will, when I go on a browser, be like, all right, reject all, reject marketing. But I don't think about that as much necessarily when I'm looking at health monitoring devices. And it's definitely something to be more vigilant about. - Yeah. We've talked about this on a previous episode, but smart glasses are a major trend that's happening. It's interesting that we're kind of moving away from VR, which was hot for a while, and moving into more like AR,
like information that's overlaid on glasses, devices that you interact with verbally as opposed to a screen, which is interesting. I can understand the rationale for that. So let's say you have a smart watch or a smart ring, and you're able to have your AI glasses that are telling you metrics that are. It's not like a discrete moment where you look down and have to access that data. It's just always being fed into you. Yeah.
I'm not sure how I feel about smart rings. Have you used those before? - Like the. - Like the Oura ring? - I've never used them, though you do need an app heavily for that kind of thing, especially if it just really doesn't have much input tactile stuff on it. And I don't think that's for me, just according to what I know about it. I think it might be more helpful to someone with different goals and health concerns than I do. - I like the idea of a smart ring where I'm able to track certain things or have access to certain functionality in a way that's like jewelry.
It's like it's an accessory. It kind of blends with your aesthetic. I know a lot of folks who love it for sleep tracking, which smart watches do sleep tracking. I wouldn't especially want to sleep in a smart watch that feels a little weird in terms of this heavy thing on your wrist. I guess it just depends on how interested you are in the metrics. - See, I'm not. - If I wake up tired, it's like, oh, I didn't sleep very well.
Right? - Yeah, but I know that already. - I don't know if I need to look at a graph of like, ooh. But also I think that's the other thing to keep in mind is that we sort of need to take these data points with a grain of salt. It's not 100% medically accurate. - No, of course not. - And so I think if you take it with a grain of salt and you're using it as a guideline of like, okay, this is kind of indicating what I should do and changes I should make to my behavior or sleep habits, that's one thing. But to really obsess over it and to take it as gospel, I think, is a slippery slope. - Well, we never know exactly how many calories we've burned in a workout or how many calories we've consumed in living and eating.
But it's all an estimate. - Right. So wellness tech, clearly a big trend in 2026. Curious what other big things caught your eye when you were at CES? - Autonomous vehicles. - Okay. - Yes. So we're not really improving EV batteries right now so much. It looks like they look pretty standard as to what we are seeing on the market now. But autonomous driving is getting implemented more and more. And we have different levels of autonomous driving in our vehicles now. Level zero would be nothing like a standard car.
Level three is it has some driver assistance, some self-driving, which is, I mean, widely speaking, featured on some Teslas right now. Level four means no driver. It can automate itself, drive around. That's like a Waymo. And level five, which is more theoretical at this point because I don't think it's legal, which would be that, but with no restrictions. It could drive anywhere. - Yeah. And just to clarify, level four is autonomous but geofenced. - Yes. Geofenced to a specific area.
You could say, oh, our vehicles are in Santa Monica, California only, and it won't work outside that area, which is what a few of them are doing right now. - So level five is like the next frontier where there are no borders. - Yes. Drive me to Canada. - (laughs) Yeah. That's so interesting. Just speaking for myself, I'm actually a fan of Waymo. There are some folks that I've talked to that are still uncomfortable with the idea of a car just driving you around with no driver. And the first time I stepped in one, I had a similar reservation,
but I was also just morbidly curious. I'm like, what even is this like? And it's amazing how quickly that it just feels normal. What's cool is that they have an actual like map showing you what the Waymo cameras see. And that goes a long way towards illustrating like, oh, wow, actually it can see better than a human driver in a lot of ways. It can see like when people are crossing the street. It has a heat map of all of the cars that are surrounding you. And so that was a really smart addition because it takes away, I think, some of the unknowns of like
how do these cameras actually perceive what's around you? Because it's a really clear illustration. That's not to say that it can't make mistakes or that it hasn't. There's always that risk. But I would say for something like traffic laws, which are, it's a very explicit rules-based system. It's just like you either do it or you don't. You have some judgment in terms of you know, if someone's crossing the street or if they have the right of way or like traffic signals or if someone pulls out in front of you.
But those are also things that you can anticipate and build into the programming theoretically. - I did try a couple different ones. One of them was called the Zoox. - Yeah, I've heard of that. - Yeah. It has no front or back. It can go either way. It just changes what side the lights are on. That makes so much more sense to me because if there's no driver, that's what kind of weirds me out a little bit about Waymo's is like there's a driver's seat which you can sit in if you want.
I feel like that's weird to just like sit in a driver's seat and have it drive you. But I see some people do it every once in a while. I'll look out the window and I'll see someone behind the car. - I mean, it might make the rest of the world feel more at ease. - Maybe. - Not like, oh no, there's a ghost driving the car. - My favorite thing is when people honk at my Waymo and I'm like, who are you honking at?
- You should put a dog in the front seat and then see what happens then. But the idea of a vehicle that doesn't have an explicit driver's seat section that's designed for comfort, like optimizing how much room is inside the vehicle that can either go forward or back, especially if it's an electric vehicle. I mean, they're all, as far as I know, electric vehicles, all of the autonomous vehicles that are commercially available right now. So yeah, I would actually, I'm curious to see more of those kinds of vehicles showing up in the US. I know probably overseas. - They're testing in a lot of US cities right now.
I think they have them available in Las Vegas, in San Francisco at the moment. - Oh, cool. Okay. - But they're testing in several other major cities. And I did ask how much does this cost? And they're like, right now it's free. And I think it's because there are regulatory issues or things that need to be worked out still. Because what happened when I was in Las Vegas, because they were running, was I had a ride share and my driver was like, "Those freaking things." Because they might run them out of work. And is this the next iteration? Because we've had ride share drivers effectively, in some areas, replace taxi drivers. And there's been a lot of different voices saying, is this right?
Is this fair? Et cetera. And this is a new level of labor questions to think about. - I think that there's always going to be at least some set of people who prefer having a human driver. It remains to be seen whether that's most people or as adoption of autonomous vehicles becomes more mainstream, that it tips one way or the other. - Well, I did see another car that was kind of like a Waymo, but you can own it. - Oh, I've heard these. Yeah. - Yeah. And there is a steering wheel that you can grab for your own comfort, though it's not a wheel.
It's not round because they don't want it to block the screen. So it's kind of like a yoke like this. And it can fold into the. What is it called? Sideboard? - Console? - Console. Yeah. So there's the option to have no wheel whatsoever. - Wow. Okay. - And it's like, it'll drive you around. But again, it's geofenced. And the people at that booth were very clear to tell me that all the computing is done on board and it's not shared with our servers, it's not cloud computing.
And they were saying it would be more data private. And that was unprompted. I didn't even ask her. - That's so interesting. Something I do want to mention, I brought up Privacy Not Included earlier. We actually did a research project where we read the terms of service for, I think it was 25 car manufacturers. Because cars are essentially computers now. They collect data, spoiler, and you have a terms of service that you agree to. And not a single one of these car manufacturers passed our standards of what we consider acceptable levels of privacy.
You're handing over some creepy levels of your own personal data. And so that is something to. It's interesting that they brought that up unprompted. I'd be curious to actually drill down into those terms of service and see what it actually entails. But that is something that I think a lot of folks just don't really think about. I mean, there are so many things. We were talking about wearables and health tech. - Well, you go to these conventions and you get excited by what you see. And then when it really comes out, is it what you saw earlier?
Sometimes, oftentimes, no. And that's true of many things. I used to go to E3 when it existed and they'd be like, "Pre-order now, so cool." But I tend not to pre-order video games because I need to. I'm going to see what you actually put out, then I'll give you my money. - Yeah. One thing I was going to bring up in terms of autonomous vehicles that you own, I was reading about this, it's interesting. It kind of begs the question, in terms of maintenance, in terms of where the onus is on just maintaining your vehicle and where it goes to park and recharge, does it go to some kind of a garage and then it comes when you summon it?
It is just kind of interesting to think how that changes things in terms of the concept of car ownership and what does it even mean to drive yourself in the future? - I once went to a futurist talk and the speaker was saying, people will think it was horrible in the future that we used to drive our own cars. You were in charge of that tons weighing thing and you could just hit anyone with it? But I think it's the kind of thing that ideally works if it's fully adopted or at least almost fully adopted because humans are an uncharitable variable at times.
- I mean, think about when cars were new and traffic laws were sort of in flux and they were kind of flying by the seat of their pants and people were fully just like. Because they were interacting also with horse and buggies and it's just like-- - One lane dirt roads. That's how Matthew died on "Downton Abbey," everyone. - (laughs) Well, speaking of autonomous things, something that I've been fascinated by and at times, depending on my mood, is like fascinated in a good or bad way. But I see a lot of humanoid robots and things that seem like vaporware to me, but it's just kind of like.
I'm just morbidly fascinated with this idea of creepy looking humanoid robots doing chores in your house. How is that at CES? Were you surrounded by robots? Did they replace all the people in the booths? What's going on with humanoid robots? - I'm convinced that some of these robots don't actually work autonomously and are just programmed to do this very specific thing for this very specific demo and are there to scare people into thinking, oh no, we're getting replaced. What is this digital dystopia? But I think a lot of it is marketing and not actual.
What I saw more of is robots that aren't necessarily humanoid, but were still helpful for daily tasks or household tasks. Mind you, the laundry folding robot definitely got a lot of eyes and buzz this year. "Why do you need a robot to fold your. You could do it yourself." And it's like, yes, most people could do almost anything technically, but I think where those shine are for people who cannot do those things, perhaps due to disabilities or whatever.
- I saw the vacuum with legs that goes upstairs, which is kind of cute. But yeah, with the humanoid robots in particular, I think a lot of them I've read, they actually have someone puppeteering them or someone wearing a VR headset. - Jim Henson has been doing this for decades. That's not new. - You know, the iconography of a humanoid robot and how it's been part of our popular culture for decades in science fiction and I don't know, just this, I guess, human drive to create things in our own image. - Not everything needs to be human shaped to be useful. And I would actually prefer if they weren't because that is the hallmark of creepiness. And I don't want a husk
of a soulless humanoid bot not staring at me in my home. I'd much rather have a little thing that climbs the stairs and vacuums. - Yeah. It is interesting that when it looks human, it feels like we project emotions onto them. - Can't do that. - So I mentioned before, I used to work in kids' content and at our office, we had this cute little robot called Jibo. I believe it was a Kickstarter. - You told me about this. - Yes. And it looks almost like a little Pixar character. And it's essentially like a fancy Alexa where you could ask it questions.
It searches the internet. It can plug into your. It can control smart lights and you can play music. When you play music on it, it would dance. And then the saddest thing happened where the. - Tell me about the day Jibo died. - Jibo died because the company stopped supporting it. And it just like gradually started glitching out. And I wasn't working at this company anymore, but I still have friends there. And they had to unplug Jibo. It was really sad. But the kids, when it was actually functioning, the kids were obsessed with it.
We would have kids come in all the time when we were shooting YouTube videos and they would just surround that thing and make it dance and just do little simple things. And so maybe there is something to be said about something that's more like a toy, that it's like you play with or interact with. But then also, I see where your face is going is like. - You see my face looking skeptical. - Whenever it connects to the internet, it's a slippery slope into telling things that it shouldn't tell little kids or collecting things that it shouldn't collect.
- Well, I wonder, is this a good idea to teach kids so young to tell this robot everything and ask it anything? - Yeah. - Because the kid didn't read the terms of service. The kid doesn't know. - Well, I think the through line in all of this, ahead of 2026 or any kind of future technology in general is to always be vigilant about how we're interacting with it and what we're signing over to these companies. It's cool that we have a lot of this exciting tech that's on the horizon and can definitely see really valuable use cases for that. But I think that we all benefit from having open and honest transparency around how our data
is being used and just how it interacts with our lives. - Yeah, I think it's absolutely about remembering that you do have a choice and not getting dazzled by all these. Wow, look at all these robots. I should just buy them all and hit yes to consent. And I'm wondering, have you thought that about anything this year, audience? I'm talking to you, not Steve. Is there tech that makes you feel excited for the future of technology this year or does it make you a little uneasy?
Let us know in the comments. - Yeah, absolutely. And in the meantime, make sure to subscribe and download Firefox because you know it's the best. We'll see you next time. - Bye. (upbeat music)
