CES is where technology comes to announce itself. Eight years ago it was voice assistants. Four years ago it was the metaverse. This year it was full of AI, but the room responded most strongly to a Danish toy company that spent years making a brick that hums when you swing a lightsaber.

The Smart Brick is genuinely impressive engineering — a 4.1mm custom chip packed with accelerometers, magnetic field sensors, light sensors, a synthesiser and a miniature speaker, all inside a standard 2x4 brick that is backwards compatible with every LEGO set made since 1958. Swing a Star Wars lightsaber and it hums. Move the X-wing and the engines roar as lights fire across the hull. Put the policeman in the driver's seat and the chase begins. There is no app, no pairing, no screen. The reactions are generated live from motion, placement and context — not triggered from pre-recorded clips. LEGO describes this as its most significant evolution since the introduction of the Minifigure in 1978.

CES is dominated by companies racing to embed AI into everything — laptops, televisions, refrigerators, cars. The premise of the show is that more intelligence, more connectivity, and more software is always the direction of progress. Against that backdrop, LEGO arrived with a product whose central argument is almost the opposite: that the most valuable thing technology can do is disappear into a physical object and enhance what the hands are already doing. No screen. No app. No account.

Some critics worried the Smart Brick could undermine what was once great about LEGO — that children imagine the sounds and lights themselves. Others who got the sets early found the experience underwhelming: the sounds don't match Star Wars, the battery lasts under an hour. But at the most AI-saturated CES so far, the thing people talked about was a toy disconnected from AI.