The "Whisperverse": The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head – Big Think t.co/aUN2SpNrTW
— Giuliano Tavaroli (@cuoretoro) October 7, 2024
The “Whisperverse”: The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head
AI-powered assistants are set to become a part of daily life, offering guidance and reminders through body-worn devices that blend artificial intelligence with augmented reality. While these technologies will provide users with useful “superpowers,” they also raise concerns about privacy and the potential for manipulation. Louis Rosenberg, an AI and augmented reality researcher, argues we must balance innovation and user protection, and that policymakers should set regulations prioritizing user agency over targeted advertising.
Within the next few years, an AI assistant will take up residence inside your head. It will do this by whispering guidance into your ears as you go about your daily routine, reminding you to pick up your dry cleaning as you walk down the street, helping you find your parked car in a stadium lot, and prompting you with the name of a coworker you pass in the hall. It may even coach you as you converse with friends and coworkers, giving you interesting things to say that make you seem smarter, funnier, and more charming than you are. These will feel like superpowers.
Of course, everyone else will be “augmented” too, creating an arms race among the public to embrace the latest features and functions. This is the future of mobile computing. It will transform the bricks we carry around all day into body-worn devices that see and hear our surroundings and covertly whisper useful information and friendly reminders at every turn.
Most of these devices will be deployed as AI-powered glasses because they give the best vantage point for cameras to monitor our field of view, though camera-enabled earbuds will be available too. The other benefit of glasses is that they can be enhanced to display visual content, enabling the AI to provide silent assistance as text, images, and realistic immersive elements that are integrated spatially into our world.
This future is the result of two technologies maturing and merging into one: artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Their combination will enable AI assistants to ride shotgun in our lives, observing our world and giving us advice so useful that we’ll quickly feel like we can’t live without it. Of course, there are serious privacy concerns, not to mention the risk of AI-powered persuasion and manipulation, but what choice will we have? When big tech starts selling superpowers, not having these abilities will mean being at a disadvantage socially, professionally, economically, and intellectually.
AC