The human augmentation technology that Startup Nation invented and forgot.

1. How Far We Have Come

In a previous piece for The Times of Israel, I wrote about how Israel became the world’s most consequential computer vision ecosystem, examining breakthroughs, companies, and ideas that shaped this field. From Mobileye that created AI software that understand roads and traffic and real-time video to detect lanes, pedestrians, and traffic signs; OrCam that created devices to help blind or low vision people to instantly read text, recognize faces, and identify products;  UVeye that created a touchless inspection system to scan vehicles in seconds, to Trigo that, using ceiling cameras, tracks shopper movements and product picks in retail stores, without using facial recognition.

All this AI technology Israel built was mainly aimed at the physical world: cars, cameras, factories, and stores, processed at the “edge”, where the action is, not in some distant cloud. Machines were the easier problem. The contracts were there. The ROI was measurable. So, the ecosystem that invented modern computer vision quietly optimized itself for everything except the one entity that actually drives the global economy: the human being.

This is a fallacy: machines do not buy products, book flights, choose restaurants, or decide between two brands on a supermarket shelf. Every company that has ever bought a computer vision system ultimately runs on human decisions.

The companies that built on Israel’s computer vision foundation tell the story clearly. They are extraordinary companies solving real problems at real scale, pointed in the same direction: making machines and commercial environments smarter, faster, more efficient. The retailer benefits. The logistics operator benefits. The fleet manager benefits. The shopper, the driver, the pedestrian moving through all of these environments remain exactly as they were. Unaugmented. Unaided. Still running on biological perception alone in a world that has already moved on without them.

OrCam was the exception. Born from the same DNA as Mobileye, founded by........

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