Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: courtesy retailer

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has invested tens of billions of dollars in headset and glasses technology, has lately been making the argument that we’re moving toward a post-smartphone world. “The promise of glasses is to preserve this sense of presence that you have with other people,” he said earlier this month, appealing to a general feeling of smartphone malaise and adding that he thinks “we’ve lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses.” iPhone designer Jony Ive, who recently teamed with Sam Altman at OpenAI, pitched his new AI hardware as an antidote to the “unintended consequences” of his previous invention. And Apple, whose CEO recently said it was “difficult to see a world” in which a shift to new gadgets replaces the iPhone, perhaps aided by AI, is nonetheless deeply invested in the possibility, with one augmented-reality headset under its belt and new slimmer glasses reportedly on the way.

Photo: courtesy retailer

In the tech industry’s first telling, the post-smartphone world is a simple question of what and when: glasses? Watches? Pins? Armbands? Implants?It’s portrayed as a simple matter of progress — in consumer technology, things must be replaced by newer and better things — but also as a reaction to the burdens and distractions of the previous great gadget, from which new gadgets will set us free.

A survey of the post-phone landscape as it exists, though, reveals a complication in this consumerist liberation story. Someday, a new gadget may usher us into the post-smartphone world; in the meantime, the industry will have us trying everything else at once: on our faces, in our ears, around our necks, and on our appendages. Our phones — and the always-on, data-and-attention-hungry logic they represent — aren’t being replaced. They’re being extended.

Photo: courtesy retailer

Take Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display, a pair of regularish glasses with cameras, microphones, a screen built into the lenses, and a wristband for gesture input. The product is getting good reviews, all of which understand it, at least in its current form, as a two-piece “extension” of the smartphone: a tool you can use to take photos, get directions, check messages, or interact with a chatbot without interacting with the phone that remains in your pocket.After the first wave of AI-centric “post-phone” hardware devices flopped, the ones that started to gain traction, including the Fitbit-like Bee pin, were effectively wearable phone accessories, recording users’ surroundings for summarization and recall in a smartphone app. At more than 15 years old, the Apple Watch is, for most wearers most of the time, still a device used with a smartphone on one’s person; the same goes for Android smartwatches from companies like Samsung.

Photo: courtesy retailer

It’s possible glasses like Meta’s offer a glimpse of a world in which people treat smartphones more like PCs and leave them behind whenever possible; you can still sort of see this possibility, if you squint, in some combination of smartwatches and earbuds, particularly combined with improvements in voice control. But the history of smartwatches up until now — as well as more focused gadgets such as health monitors and earbuds — suggests a different future for products like Meta’s. The Apple Watch might have gained a few features that make it easier not to check your phone, but as a smartphone alternative, it still has limited appeal. As an extension of the smartphone, though — and a way to expand users’ relationships with Apple beyond what the phone implied, into intimate and constantly recorded health information — it has been a massive success. (In sales terms, Apple Watches have been purely additive.)

Photo: courtesy retailer

In the near and medium term, the coming wave of AI-enabled gadgets should be similarly understood. Smart glasses give you a screen overlay for the world. Like smartwatches and dedicated sleep and health trackers, they also attempt to set new norms, not just for the people wearing them but for those they interact with (in this case, the wearer may be recording or simply looking at something else as they talk to you). Early AI gadgets may offer summarization, recall, or even real-time chatbot interactivity; they also normalize full social surveillance. As earbuds trend toward what was once seen as a marginal, antisocial use case — leaving them in all day, every day, with translation and chatbots on demand — they reinforce rather than weaken the pull of the smartphone, extending its interface into your ears.

Among the big tech companies, Google is probably the most honest about what it’s hoping to build: not a post-phone paradise, in which users are freed of constant interactions, distractions, and monitoring, but rather a “very diverse set of accessories” sold by Google that together heighten these relationships while making them more seamless. You may be interacting less with your phone, in other words, but you’ll be interacting with the gadgets on the rest of your body even more.

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