Amazon’s Alexa chief predicts an end to doom scrolling: the next generation is ‘going to just think differently’

Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, believes the reign of the smartphone screen may be nearing a tipping point. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, he suggested that a growing fatigue with social media “doom scrolling” is paving the way for a new era of “ambient intelligence”—one driven by a generation that interacts with technology in fundamentally different ways,.

According to Panay, the future of consumer technology isn’t about better apps, but about making the technology disappear into the background.

“There’s a whole younger generation coming up that I think at some point they get tired of doom scrolling,” he observed, noting that many young people feel “stuck” when it comes to social media. He argued that this demographic, having been raised in an emerging “AI world,” will demand interactions that bypass the friction of traditional computing.

“They’re going to just think differently,” Panay predicted. “You’ve got to make sure you have products in their pockets, on their bodies, in their homes that they don’t expect… [but] expect to connect seamlessly.”

The death of the ‘app’ experience

Panay described a user experience that eliminates the need to look at a scre...