Human are turning into cyborgs through wearable technologies

My experience with Apple AirPods led me to realize that the more we depend on wearable technologies, the less agency we ourselves have.

Dec 28, 2020

The Big Idea

I recently came into possession of a pair of Apple AirPods. My parents received two sets as a consolation gift from Apple after they messed up my father’s computer and, having no idea what they were or how to use them, my mother gifted her pair to me.

I used to mock people who wore AirPods. Coming from a customer service background as a barista/bartender, I couldn’t stand people who wore wireless earphones in the shop because I could never tell if they were speaking to me or to the person in their ear. I found them to be rude (the people and the technology). However, having now owned a pair of AirPods for a few months, I have come to realize that they represent a much more serious threat than simply making baristas like myself feel disrespected.

I’ve come to realize that AirPods and other wearable technologies are turning humans into cyborgs; that they are the most popular in a line of biomechatronic devices that people willingly attach to their bodies without thinking twice.

And I completely understand why people do it. To be perfectly honest, I like AirPods: they are probably the most user-friendly piece of technology I have ever owned. You want to connect them to any device? No problem. One fell out of your ear? Don’t worry, whatever is playing will simply pause until you put it back in. Receiving a call? Just tell Siri to answer and you don’t even have to pull out your phone.

All of these features help make AirPods feel like a natural appendage to the body. In fact, they are so comfortable and so user-friendly that it is easy to forget if they are even in your ears most of the time. But while all of these features seem innocent, so did the ones in our smartphones when they first hit the market.

The recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma forced a lot of us to rethink the technology we use, focusing on software such as social media platforms and how they influence our actions. But this critique falls short: It fails to take into account the hardware we depend upon, such as Apple AirPods and other wearable devices, which also influence our actions and behaviours and the way our society operates, though in more subtle ways.

Wireless earphones/headphones dictate how we move through public spaces and interact (or don’t interact) with others. They are contributing to reduced in-person interaction because when we walk around listening to music or a podcast, we tend not to be as social. And although it might seem harmless — or even positive — to not have to interact with the person asking for change on the corner or with the lady sitting across from you on the bus, there is a considerable body of research demonstrating that face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being, even short interactions with a stranger.

We have become so conditioned to using our technology in public spaces that we are beginning to feel more comfortable communicating through our devices than we are in-person. In other words, we feel more at peace in the online realm than we do in the natural world despite in-person social interaction having been a crucial part of human socialization and the forming of communities for all of history. Plus, as more and more young people grow up without learning these social skills, more and more young people develop social anxiety and withdraw themselves even further from the real world.

Think about dating, for example. Many of us live in a society where dating has shifted online, even prior to the coronavirus pandemic. Part of that shift is due to it being harder to meet people in person, which is in part due to our increasing dependence on devices that distract us and make us less willing to meet people in public spaces. The problem, aside from online dating being an unnatural time-sucking experience, is that there is evidence that it lowers self-esteem and increases depression.

The romanticization of technology that many people fall prey to actually makes us fear nature and destroy it in favour of technological progress. Corporations such as Apple want this: they want their products to feel so natural that they seem inevitable — as if their products are the destined course of history. The ultimate goal for these corporations is for humans and machines to work as one: to become cyborgs. And although we don’t tend to think about it this way, wearing AirPods and other wearable technologies is a significant step towards this dystopian reality.

The global hearables market, dominated by wireless earphones and headphones, is currently valued at USD 25.1 billion and is growing rapidly at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 20.3 percent from 2020 to 2027. In fact, hearables are forecast to replace smartwatches as the top category in the wearables market, with shipments expected to rise from 46 million units in 2019 to 158 million units by 2022.

The technology is rapidly improving, too. It is becoming more user-friendly, more affordable, and even more soundproof so that users don’t have to hear anything outside of their bubble. These devices carry chips within them that process data for us, and those chips are becoming more and more sophisticated. For now, we are able to remove these chips from our ears at will. But the next step in the evolution of wearable technology is to have them inserted directly into our brains.

The problem, aside from people being more comfortable in the online realm than they are in the real world, where anxiety rates are raising, is that these devices take away our agency. We are losing control over our actions: We no longer dictate what we listen to — the algorithm does that. We don’t have to manually pause our music or answer a call — our earphones do that with a simple touch. We no longer need to ask the person on the bus for the time because we can just ask Siri.

By depending so much on our devices, we are losing crucial human skills such as remembering songs or details, making eye contact in social settings, and reading social cues. The more skills we lose, the more attracted we are to technology, and the less attracted we are to unmediated human interaction.

When we think about cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), our minds naturally wander to science fiction’s prototypical half-man, half-machine characters such as RoboCop or Darth Vader. But what about the ones who appear human if not for subtle (or hidden) biomechatronic body parts or chips? Those, too, are cyborgs.

In the Star Wars series, for example, Lobot wears the AJ^6 cyborg construct, a cybernetic device attached to the backside of a user's head that increases the user's productivity.

According to its Wiki page: “the Aj^6 came under criticism since it was seen to limit a wearer's personality, and almost literally turned them into walking machines. This resulted in a lack of face-to-face communication between a cyborg and other sentients, since their attentions were often turned to central computers.”

As Lando Carlissian said: "You think Lobot's mute, but he's just too busy talking to the central computer to bother speaking to us 'organics.’”

Sound familiar?

Notes

Question (please respond in the comments)

If the natural endpoint is for everyone to eventually walk around public spaces with wireless earphones/headphones on all the time, what will we miss out on?

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I’m always looking for writing work! If you have any leads, email: orenweisfeld@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter: @orenweisfeld. My published work can be found here.

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