“Come test wearable tech in Midtown!” Max Callimanopulos joins a few dozen Craigslist respondents for four hours of testing wearable technology prototypes for Meta, playing a series of boring videogames while his temperature, heart rate, and muscle movements are recorded for use by the company. “So far,” Callimanopulos writes of AI-powered wearable tech, “the pins, glasses, and pendants launched at us have been unwieldy, redundant, and irredeemably unsexy.” They also seem to accomplish very little, save for closing the distance between our bodies and the digital world.
At first, the games were amusing. I felt like a dog, chasing virtual balls around the screen. Ka-ching! But it quickly became boring. I stopped caring whether or not I found my target, and let the cursor hang there listlessly. I imagined my data points, flowing into the wires trailing from my arm, becoming confused and erratic. Somewhere, I thought, was a researcher, or perhaps an AI agent, who would translate these infinitesimal adjustments of my muscles and ligaments into trackable, monetizable patterns. There was something unsettling about the precision of these readings. Having long since absorbed my attention span and digital habits into its global archive of human behavior, Meta was now determined to collect these last, individual, trifling details: the flick of my finger, the turn of my wrist, the places my eyes lingered on the screen. I let my hand drop. I stopped chasing the ball. I hoped they would conclude that the appeal of wearable tech declines dramatically after the first half hour of use.
More picks about where the corporeal and digital worlds meet—or don’t
The Future Is Too Easy
“CES, which this year claimed 141,000 attendees and 4,500 exhibitors, could on the other hand have been anywhere, or everywhere.”
Meta’s Flirty AI Chatbot Invited a Retiree to New York. He Never Made It Home.
“A cognitively impaired New Jersey man grew infatuated with a Facebook Messenger chatbot with a young woman’s persona. His fatal attraction puts a spotlight on Meta’s AI guidelines, which have let chatbots make things up and engage in ‘sensual’ banter with children.”
When Your Digital Life Vanishes
“A broken phone or corrupted drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. But sometimes data-recovery experts can summon lost files from the void.”
