In Berlin, artificial intelligence is stepping off the screen. And on the walls, someone is telling it to switch off

The paradox begins the moment you step outside the exhibition centre. Inside the Messe Berlin exhibition halls, where the 102nd edition of IFA opened today, the European and Asian tech industries are trying to convince us that artificial intelligence has finally ceased to be just a computer thing and has become a companion in life. Outside, in the city’s neighbourhoods, someone has daubed the opposite message on the walls: put your phone down.

“Lieben statt Liken”. Love instead of liking. “Tanzen statt Twittern”. Dance instead of tweeting. And then the most explicit manifesto: better to have a few friends to laugh and argue with than a crowd of followers. These are the installations by RASF, the Radikale Anti-Smartphone Front, a movement that has been appearing on the streets of Berlin for months and has turned its opposition to compulsive smartphone use into a kind of guerrilla campaign. Not against technology, at least not in a Luddite sense. Against that particular form of technology that allows you to be everywhere at once, provided you’re not where you actually are.

It is hard to imagine a better coincidence for reporting on this year’s IFA. Because the real theme of the fair is not simply artificial intelligence: that has now become the industry’s wallpaper. The theme is where to put it. And the companies’ answer is: everywhere, preferably without us even realising it.

AMD opened the event with a keynote aptly titled “The Era of Personal AI”, whilst Lenovo brought its vision of Hybrid AI to Berlin: an intelligence that does not reside in a single device, but moves between computers, the cloud and connected devices depending on where it is needed. The PC, which has been written off time and again without realising it was always in perfect working order, thus returns to centre stage: no longer merely a terminal, but a place where artificial intelligence can also reside.

The home is the other major battleground. LG is talking about AI Home and unveiling ThinQ Claw, an agent designed to control household appliances via natural language. Xiaomi is making its first real appearance in Berlin with an ecosystem that brings together ‘Human × Car × Home’: the home, the car and the user’s body, all within a single promise of technological continuity. So, no longer just the smart fridge. The ambition is for objects to communicate with one another and, if possible, to understand us too.

Perhaps the most interesting development is this: the industry seems to have finally realised that the future cannot consist of simply adding yet another app to the smartphone. The smartphone will, of course, remain, but it will lose its physical centrality. AI must be embedded in computers, televisions, washing machines, cars and robots. It must become part of the environment.

And Berlin provides an unintentionally perfect backdrop for the project. For whilst discussions in the exhibition halls focus on personal assistants and devices that anticipate our needs, out on the streets the RASF poses a far less sophisticated question: are we sure we always want to be available to someone or something?

This is no minor issue. It is perhaps the contradiction that the technology industry will have to face in the coming years. For over a decade, we have centred our digital lives on a rectangle of plastic and glass that we hold in our hands. Now, technology promises to free us from that very rectangle, whilst at the same time spreading everywhere around us. Less screen time does not necessarily mean less technology.

Perhaps this is the real news story of this year’s IFA. Not a single robot, nor yet another computer promising to be smarter than the last. Artificial intelligence is trying to become invisible. To vanish from our sight and become part of our daily routines. Meanwhile, in Berlin, someone keeps suggesting another innovation on the walls: looking each other in the eye.