Wearables wasteland
You walk into the streets of Hong Kong in 2099 gliding on your feet, hovering mere millimeters above the sewage-stained streets of the night market. You scan the crowd looking for your mate and immediately identify him standing on the stairs by the market entrance. You lock on to an audio channel with him and immediately begin conversing, clearly being able to hear and converse with him amidst the howling wind and cacophony of vendors yelling their lungs out trying to sell you on the latest scam gizmo or gadget. Your earpiece alerts you to loud decibel exposure and dims the noise around you, allowing you to focus on the singular conversation while drowning out everything else around you. You ask your mate, a paraplegic, how the new leg implants are as you glide towards him. He says they feel as natural as his real legs as he demonstrates their reach and flexibility through a series of seemingly rehearsed hops, stretches, and backward spins. He climbs the staircase backwards while looking down the stairs, nearly stumbling into a couple who avoid him at the last second with their kinetic evasion skeletal frames. He apologizes to them and speeds down the stairs as fast as the motors in his legs allow him to, shakily landing right in front you with a giddy smile as you arrive at the foot of the staircase. You marvel at his legs which look as normal as a any other pair of human legs, with skin and hair and all the fleshy bits, all while hiding a complex tapestry of nano-circuitry, alloyed metals, miniaturized motors, and neural links connect directly to the nerves going up to the brain.
Every imagined future of science fiction likes to sell us a cyberpunk dystopia where robotic implants are clearly distinguishable, synthetically augmenting our limbs and senses in an eerie, unnatural fusion of metal and muscle. They show us a world where man and machine visibly meld into an unrecognizable form that’s neither one or the other but some other intermediate entity entirely. The drama comes from this being’s struggle to reconcile its human emotions and vulnerability with its machine mind and form, often resolving in a poetic moment where the machine learns to think like a man and prides itself for overcoming insurmountable odds and becoming the best of both worlds. The likely reality, however, is that we’ll end up in a world similar to the one where you meet your paraplegic friend in Hong Kong, one where we’ll integrate technology so closely and deeply into ourselves that we won’t be able to tell the difference between who’s a “cyborg” and who’s not. One where you wouldn’t quite be able to the rich apart from the poor without taking drastic action like physically inflicting harm on them. One where the haves will be able to perceive a world with senses that reach farther and wider than they ever could, and the have-nots who will be stuck with the evolutionary limits of senses that were given to them at the dawn of the anthropocene.
It may sound far-fetched, but we’re well on our way here already. Just as the manifestation of this reality looks invisible, so is the journey there — unless you’re paying close attention to how the frog is being boiled. The smartphone era ushered in the age of pocket computers, where information is accessible anywhere and everywhere, for better or worse. You’re connected at all times whenever you have your phone with you. In this brief but momentous age, you could still disconnect from technology. You could leave your phone at home and go for a run or idle around at the beach. The technology is contained in a small rectangular device and you are physically and mentally separated from it. Then came the wearables, the pilot light that turned on the stove to start boiling the pot. It started with a device you wear on your wrist, the watch. It then absorbed devices you put in your ears to privately listen to music, the earbuds. It’s now coming for how you visually perceive the world with your eyes, glasses.
As we approach the boiling point, these are still technologies in their infancy. They can still be physically separated from your body and you can disconnect from them. But there will come a version of it where it is so small, so integrated, and so invisible that you wouldn’t care to take it off. The passive conveniences they provide will be so beneficial that you’d trade away autonomy, agency, and privacy entirely for how much they amplify and augment your life. A simmering boil. And soon after, you can’t imagine life without them. They’ll be so deeply entrenched in societal expectations and norms that the corporations making these products and technologies will have a say in how you move, what you see, what you hear, and what your future will be like. More concerningly, they can substitute your reality with they believe to be better for you based on the data for you. Cue the rolling boil that kills the frog.
The watch is the longest-standing example of a wearable that we can dissect to see this evolution happening in real-time. The most popular wearable, the Apple Watch, came out in 2015. It was already late to the party, but it integrated really well into the iPhone ecosystem. I personally owned one and had it on launch day. While I admired its form, interaction design, and innovations in gestural navigation, I stopped using it within two weeks. It provided no real value to me outside of being able to see notifications on my wrist without needing to pull my phone outside my pocket. That wasn’t enough of a sell for me to think about keeping yet another device charged and yet another thing I needed to remember to take with me every morning. Additionally, I didn’t love the idea that there was a device on me that could steal my attention from whatever I was doing with a notification buzz on my wrist simply because it was always on me. Something about the thought made me feel uncomfortable, so I stopped using it and never looked back.
The Apple Watch is now in its tenth iteration, having recently released the Series X this fall. Despite not being an owner of the product, I’ve been closely following its evolution over the years to see what changes Apple has been making in its value proposition to users to convince more people that having technology constantly on your body is a good thing. There’s some expected moves like physically separating it from the iPhone to operate independently with a cellular signal and adding speakers on the watch itself, with many other minor improvements to the OS over the years. But the biggest and most dramatic improvement I’ve seen Apple make to the watch is in its health tracking capabilities. By miniaturizing dozens of sensors and detecting nuances in minuscule variations in your pulse, the Apple Watch can tell you when you’re at risk of a heart diseases or about to experience a stroke. It can track your sleep with a high degree of accuracy and tell you when you had breathing problems at night. It can tell when you’ve taken a hard fall or been in a car crash. Best of all, it can take follow-up action immediately by automatically calling emergency services and alerting your doctors. This, in my opinion, is the killer feature of the Apple Watch.
When you get skill points in a video game, the most obvious thing to spend it on is power-ups that give you passive abilities. Health that slowly regenerates or a 30% increase in your chances of finding rare items or a boost in movement speed. These are things that give you benefits for doing things that you would already be doing in the game anyway and take away the need to memorize a complex button-combo for a new combat move or the need to remember performing some action after every event (if the upgrade requires you to do it). They just happen passively when you’re playing the game as you normally would. This is exactly the Health & Fitness play for the Apple Watch, where a device that’s constantly on your wrist passively tracks everything about your health for you and provides you with actionable insights about how things are going without you ever needing to do anything. You just continue living your life as you normally would, and the device tells you what you need to know. This is what makes the Apple Watch feel like a product that’s inseparable from your body, even in its current form.
Over time, the Apple Watch’s form factor will change, perhaps down to a fabric patch that you simply slap onto your wrist as it melds into your skin without any trace of it being there. Once you have a generation that has grown up with a smartwatch, it’s an easier sell to their kids that having technology on your wrist all times is a worthwhile thing to consider. It becomes normalized in society as parents slap the Apple Patch on their kids’ skin, reassured that they can always track their kids’ location if something bad happens and that they would be alerted if their child ever got into an accident or has develops some kind of health condition. The benefits it would provide, aided by an entire generation that has already beta tested it all in an earlier iteration, would make it a very easy sell as the product improves in form and function. There would of course be the staunch anti-technologist factions who refuse to slap on any kind of technology to their kids, committed to the surveillance-free and independent lifestyle that they want their kids to enjoy. But for the overwhelming majority of people, the comfort and confidence that the technology provides would no doubt overrule the lingering concerns around privacy and control.
The Apple Patch would be able to pinpoint exact latitudes and longitudes that you were at during every moment of your life. It could chart a Hero’s Journey on the globe with your movements over your entire lifetime, culminating in a cheesy Wrapped at the end of every year that millions around the world share out, proudly displaying the number of continents they set foot on on in that calendar year or the airspace they traveled over with their flightpath tracks. Not to mention the immense judicial benefits this would have for being able to know exactly where someone was at a given time, narrowing the possibility space for alibis and evidence tampering. It would serve as the ultimate crime deterrent if you knew that someone else knew where you were at all times. The prosecution would be able to call upon any and every witness who was present at the scene of the crime just by having their location data. There are plenty of dystopian negatives too, of course. Private health insurance companies would know exactly what conditions you have and would be able to inflate your rates accordingly. The device would get so accurate at predicting your lifespan that it could tell you exactly how much you need to save for retirement, encouraging people to take some truly unpredictable paths in their lives. It would give you such a good sense of genetic disorders that you’re likely to pass on that it may discourage people entirely from having biological offsprings.
When a technology becomes so deeply integrated into society, it becomes a question of equality. How do we treat the ones who choose not to have these technologies implanted in them? How do we maintain the presumption of innocence and provide equal rights when there’s a big piece of data missing about their lives that we have about everyone else’s lives? How do we avoid falling into the psychological biases of questioning down the line of What are they hiding? How can we make sure industries and healthcare technologies provide fair services to those who choose to have this device and those who don’t without discriminating against one of them? How do we maintain freedom of choice without mandating that people get this device, one way or another? Even if it seems like the technology is a generation or two away, the reality is that our laws move at a pace of five generations, with the oldest usually holding back progress towards the next logical leap. Lawmakers and loosely-held authorities of power won’t be able to keep pace with the rapid changes coming down the line, and many will succumb to the conveniences offered by the device themselves. The socio-technical impacts of these products will be felt at a visceral level, regardless of whether you choose to get it or not.
And all this is just about the evolution of one wearable, the watch. Apple, a single company, is simultaneously pursuing the same path through multiple avenues in its product lineup. The AirPods Pro, the single best-selling piece of plastic that made it into millions of peoples’ ear canals worldwide, is next on the list. The AirPods first perfected being a great wireless earbud in a space where every other product lacked in either connectivity, battery, or sound quality. AirPods came out of the gate with a seamless integration into the iOS ecosystem and made it dead simple for any iPhone owner to use it. Despite an initial wave of sentiment where many felt it looked too out-of-place for someone to be practically wearing this in their ears for hours of end, the benefits caught on. Calls were crystal clear when you spoke into the AirPods microphone, music controls were very easy to use with gestures, and the case made it very easy to keep them charged for hours on end. Over the years, Apple added noise-cancellation, voice isolation, spatial audio, and the ability to pair them with your Apple TV or any Bluetooth device. It truly is one of the best set of wireless earbuds you can buy today at its price point.
With the latest release of the AirPods Pro, the same health features in the Apple Watch are now crawling their way into the AirPods. The AirPods can now tell you about decibel levels that are too loud and adjust the volume down accordingly. You can now take a hearing test on the AirPods to check if you’re at risk for hearing loss. Soon, I’m sure Apple will be able to detect so much about your eardrums that they will ensure it feels more comfortable to have the AirPods in your ears at all times rather than not have it in. It will be able to amplify dialogue and human voices in your household so that you can hear your family member from the other room without them needing to yell at you. It will be able to drown out the loud train that comes by every hour or the Roomba that cleans the house every weekend. Your AirPods will cancel out the sound of the TV if you’re in the living room reading a book while your sibling watches the TV. Multiple family members will be able to watch a movie with separate audio tracks and individualized settings for enhanced dialogue, reduced explosions, and muted high-pitched sound preferences. When you travel, the AirPods’ live translation will translate in real-time what someone is saying you to in Mandarin and your English response will be translated in real-time through the recipient’s AirPods (there is a very laggy and slow version of this that already exists with Google’s Pixel Buds). As you look out the window on your train ride from the airport, the AirPods will point out what you’re seeing and provide an audio commentary with AI-powered insights, becoming your personal tour guide for your journey without ever feeling like it’s disconnecting you from the world around you. Apple will be able to design your own private aural landscape that is custom-made to allow and amplify only the sounds you want and filter out the ones you don’t.
None of these predictions are science-fiction. The seemingly infinite scalability of large language models and AI combined with Apple’s branding of “Apple Intelligence” selling you AI in a useful and digestible way, this can all come true within the next decade or so. The Apple Watch’s passive health features have come so far in ten iterations without the boost from AI. Imagine the AirPods in 2035 with everything mentioned above. You would never want to take them out of your ears. The modern industrialized world with its obnoxious honking cars, loud emergency sirens, and construction work on every intersection would feel so intrusive and overstimulating that you would feel naked without your AirPods. You would want to put them in immediately and retreat to your private aural oasis where the frequency and amplitude of every soundwave is tailored just right to how you prefer it. You wouldn’t want to hear the world any other way.
The 2035 version of AirPods may still be physical devices you insert into your ears, but the 2045 version may not. Perhaps its a small bead of jelly that you insert into your ears and no one ever knows it’s there, or maybe it’s also a patch that you apply into the ear canal. Either way, it won’t be a piece of plastic that is visibly dangling from your ear broadcasting to everyone that you have some technology augmenting and filtering what you’re hearing. You’ll likely be able to make calls and hear people on the other side even more clearly by the AirPods translating micro-movements in bone density on your jaws into audio signals that match your voice and tone.
This strategy of slowly making a broken world around you more comfortable through individualized devices molded to your personal taste comes with a lot of socio-economic implications. Noise pollution, in its traditional sense, will become less of a hot topic. If you can just tune out the annoyances, why bother regulating decibel levels in residential zones? If you can simply choose what you want to hear and what you don’t, why not let construction crews jackhammer at night on your street while you sleep? This is, of course, human selfishness and techno-capitalist greed hyper optimizing for our own good at the expense of the millions of pets and animals that rely on a quiet night to modulate their circadian rhythm. Us prioritizing our own desire for growth and economic boom at the expense of risking our entire biosphere collapsing due to nighttime noise pollution that non-humans don’t have the tools to regulate, not to mention the many actual humans that actively choose not to want this technology in their body. It leads to the same ethical and moral concerns as the Apple Watch’s future iteration, just on a grander and more ecological scale.
And that brings us to our eyes. Meta and Google have put out glasses with “invisible” technology in them in the past decade, but Apple is playing the long game here with the Vision Pro. They started with an expensive Pro model that, over time, will likely reduce its form factor to a contact lens that permanently stays on your retina. The future here is wildly speculative and wide open, but it’s also the most concerning. Vision is the primary way for most humans to absorb information about the world and process it. The Vision Pro’s successors will be able to let you have eye tests, eliminating the need for yearly optometrist visits and getting your vision checked. Those successors will likely have corrective lenses built into-them with your prescription, especially if they end up pursuing the contact lens form factor. They’ll even be able to diagnose glaucoma or dry eye or macular degeneration. And then starts the real concerning augmentation of visual reality — what breed is that dog, what is that person’s spouse’s name, what does this Japanese sign say? Everything at a moment’s notice, immediately available without any cognitive function required. You can look at something and instantly retrieve terabytes of information about it without a single neuron needing to make a roundtrip to your brain’s personal archive of memories about that thing.
There are a thousand benefits of having an augmented reality contact lens. Those multiple family members watching “TV” in the living room with individualized auto settings on their AirPods can choose to project on-screen, just for themselves, a subtitle audio track without disturbing the people around you that don’t want subtitles. They can filter out gore or excessive blood on their personal projections of the TV that’s simultaneously being viewed by multiple people while also allowing unique visual experiences for each viewer. You can spot concerning bacteria in your body or mold in parts of your house. You can measure exact distances between walls or accurately estimate the height of each towering pillar of the Sagrada Familia. You can tell if a fall from a cliff is likely going to break your bones or if the water is deep enough to cushion your fall. You can look at tap water in Morocco and tell if it’s safe to drink or not. You can visualize pollen and avoid certain paths if you’re allergic to them. You can look up at the night sky and tell exactly which nebula you’re looking and whether or not that bright star really is Saturn, all without ever having to pull out your phone. There are so many benefits to simply knowing more about the world around you, and it’s the easiest sell of all wearable technology.
But as always, there are going to be the nefarious drawbacks. Apple being able to tell exactly what you’re looking at, all the time, isn’t a good thing. Ads will pause unless you’re directly looking at them for their entire runtime. You can be forced to read and acknowledge specific words and phrases in legal documents. You can be vilified for staring at someone for too long in a certain suggestive way. You can be reprimanded for not paying attention in school or elsewhere. Companies that realize you’re not engaging or even looking at certain segments of their marketing materials can use the data about what you do look at and pay attention to for completely rethinking how they market their brands to target you specifically. Your risk of eye diseases will be pulled into your health report and sold to insurance companies that try to sell you more expensive premiums. And that’s just the basic stuff. With the coming AI revolution, you will be able to erase entire demographics of homeless people you don’t want to see on your walk to work. You will be able to literally reimagine people in a different light by having your lenses artificially enhance their appearance. You will be able to make your spouse look more attractive and beautiful, and they can do the same for you through their lenses. It will all feel like one giant psycho-social reality experiment that we’d all unwillingly partake in.
Again, much of this sounds like it would immediately be shut down on arrival, but like with everything else, it’s not a step change but a gradual shift. People won’t go out in droves to buy these lenses so they can make their family more beautiful, they’ll do it because it passively enhances their lived experience of perceiving the visual world. You don’t need to own a TV if you can project a movie wherever you are. You don’t need to have a bookshelf with a hundred books if you can simply speed read words being projected in front of your eyes during a commute to work. All these conveniences will outweigh the concerns around intrusive technology that completely reshapes our perception and the technology will soon be normalized. Just like we’ve learned not to underestimate default settings in most products today, the big takeaway here will be to not overlook the passive benefits of wearable technology and how, slowly over time, they will make these products so good that we won’t be able to live without them.
A wearable on your wrist, a wearable in your ears, and a wearable in your eyes. Just these three alone are enough to start a massive revolution in technological augmentation of our bodies that can take us to unparalleled places that once only existed in science fiction. They’re dangerous individually, but combined together, they can completely transform our perception of the world in profound ways that our brains are in no way prepared to comprehend. And this was just one American company’s strategy that we looked at in these examples. There will be hundreds of players around the world all vying for the same thing — control. Control over our bodies, hearing, and vision. Data around what we’re doing, where we are, what we’re hearing, and what we’re seeing. Once we let them into these senses, everything else will feel like child’s play.
Sure, why not let the same companies that have provided so much sensory augmentation also improve our breathing with a wearable in our nostrils to filter out bad smells and polluted air? Why not let this company replace my failing hips, spine, or knee with a better musculoskeletal frame that integrates with my wearables’ health data? The real danger here isn’t even necessarily all the technological intrusion into our minds and bodies, but it’s what it does to our brains. It takes away our agency to process the world around us through our senses and make informed decisions in the form of choices about what to do. We’d be augmenting senses that have evolved over millions of years with an AI that doesn’t have any intent in the decisions it makes beyond its main directive programmed by its creators. We’d be offloading our choices about what we see, who we interact with, what we eat, where we go, how we behave, and how we act all to an AI agent that can monitor and control our minds and bodies in extremely subtle yet manipulative ways. And there’s no one around to stop it from turning into the 2099 Hong Kong we started this story with where invisible technology is so deeply integrated into our bodies that it’s indistinguishable from those that don’t have it, leading to an unfurling chaos of society where what it means to be human is constantly scrutinized in a world that will increasingly be built only for those who have the means to process the information being sent into it.
I still do not own an Apple Watch to this day, and don’t ever plan to have a wearable. The only time I’d ever consider it is if I end up developing a disease for which a wearable offsets the sensory loss in some way. Until then, I’m part of the resistance that will continue to keep my body separated from the technology, because I’m very carefully watching the frog the sidelines and it seems to have no idea how imperceptibly hot it’s going to get very, very quickly.