There comes a time when it’s clear that something has changed, usually around the third time you check your phone during a dinner conversation. We didn’t decide to have our relationships mediated by a glowing rectangle. It simply occurred gradually over a period of roughly fifteen years. Another shift is now beginning to emerge, and it may be more significant.
When Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon recently sat down to discuss the future of personal technology, he put it simply. He claimed that our gadgets were designed to react to us when we type, tap, or inquire. That relationship is reversed in the AI era. The apparatus begins to anticipate. It makes recommendations before you make a decision, listens before you ask, and increasingly communicates with other apps and services on your behalf without your involvement. That is a significant change to the way phones operate. It has a different perspective on the purpose of a personal device.
The headlines typically center on hardware, such as Google and Meta’s smart glasses, OpenAI’s enigmatic projects and the late Jony Ive’s design studio, jewelry, and pendants that are supposed to be able to see and hear what we do, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider what that actually means for communication. However, the more intriguing question is more subdued: what happens to a conversation when an AI agent stands right behind it, summarizing, interjecting, and finishing?
Years ago, Smithsonian researchers studying smartphones and teenagers discovered something that seems relevant today. They discovered that, frequently without anyone realizing it, the lack of in-person vulnerability in phone-mediated communication was changing how people related to one another. Texting and Snapchat streaks were the subject of that study. It’s difficult not to wonder if AI-mediated communication will accomplish the same thing, albeit more quickly and covertly.
There is a chance that this will actually benefit people. You could avoid the hassle of typing out logistics with friends or remembering to follow up on something you mentioned in passing if your assistant already knows your schedule, where you are, and your incomplete thoughts. According to Amon, if you mention meeting someone at an event, the AI will already have the picture displayed and know when you are both free in London. That’s practical. It may even improve some interactions by relieving people of the burden of coordination and allowing them to concentrate on the conversation itself.
However, improving glasses alone won’t solve the underlying tension. More than the bracelet or the lens, the real battleground becomes the question of who owns that data and who you trust enough to let it close if an agent is constantly streaming what you see and hear to a cloud somewhere. Amon brought up the question of who should and shouldn’t be the guardians of all this intimacy, almost as an aside.
None of this ensures that one gadget will prevail, as the iPhone did in the past. We might end up with multiple competing form factors, such as glasses for some, earpieces for others, phones that last longer than anyone anticipates, and laptops that outlived death predictions. It took roughly ten years for the smartphone to completely change the way we date, argue, and grieve. It will probably take the same amount of time for whatever takes its place as the primary means of communication between us to show what has truly changed, and by then, as usual, it will seem as though it was always going to happen.
