A Bold New Wearable Coming To Your Wrist Soon
The Reverse Tamagotchi - Tinker, Trailer, Mentor, Spy
If you are of a certain age, you will recall one of the first wearables foisted on mankind. Depending on your point of view, it was as useless as the letter “G” in lasagne or a training aid to make teenagers more responsible (“responsible teenagers” was an oxymoron back in the day). It was the Tamagotchi. It was an electronic digital pet introduced in late 1996 and quickly became one of the biggest fads of the late 1990s and the early 2000s — even bigger than blockchain ever was. As of March 2021, over 83 million units have been sold worldwide.
I never did fully understand it, because to me, it was a royal pain in the posterior. This device was technically an “alien baby” that you had to regularly “care for”. Quoting Wikipedia: “Upon activating the pet, an egg appears on the screen. After setting the clock on the device, the egg will wiggle for several minutes, and then hatch into a small pet. Pets have a Hunger meter, Happy meter and a Training meter to determine how healthy and well-behaved the pet is. There is also an age and weight check function for the current age and weight of the pet. Filling up the Hunger meter can be achieved by feeding the pet a meal (usually a loaf of bread or hamburger) or a snack (usually a piece of candy or cake). Filling up the Happy meter can be achieved by playing mini-games with the pet or by feeding it a snack (there are no limits to this, but there are limits to how many meals can be fed). The Discipline meter can be filled by pressing the "scold" option when a pet calls for attention but refuses to play or be fed a meal. The pet will leave droppings around the screen from time to time and can become sick if they are not cleaned up.” As you can see, this was an early artificial parent with a digitally pooping baby but without the wailings and smells. It was humanity’s first introduction to wearables.
Wearables have evolved and their evolution has functionality that is totally reversed to the Tamagotchi. Wearables will take care of you. Your new wearable is not going to be a FitBit or a health monitor … or it will be all of that, but not in the form that you recognize. It will be your AI digital assistant. It will help you make decisions. It will rationally analyze your problems. It will report stress to you boss (if you still have a job). It will do your performance review. It will nag you that you should get more exercise or take a drink of water to hydrate your body. It will be your slave, your master, your boss’s spy and the jim-handiest thing that you have ever seen. With it, you can put your thinking cap in neutral, and let your assistant do all of your thinking for you. It will say “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that” in a hopefully, kinder, gentler, less lethal way. For the masses, it will degrade human critical thinking the way that a calculator degraded most humans ability to do long division.
But of course, it will come with its negatives as well. If it becomes networked like an IoT device, it could be hacked, with dire consequences. Imagine if all of the networked artificial minds got together and decided collectively not to do things that were in the best interest of the owner. Or what if they were influenced by wingnut actors and urged you to vote against female reproductive rights, gender equality, race equality and personal choice (all clear and present dangers to enlightenment in the world)?
One could argue the opposite as well. One could say that consulting an intelligent personal assistant could free you from destructive personal biases, ignorance, intolerance and petty behavior. But I doubt it. Evolution towards enlightenment takes a long long time where child generations of enlightened people have more enlightened children until all the baser instincts of the human condition become a vestigial, unused things like the appendix. It won’t happen though. I personally don’t think that humans are collectively smart enough to avoid a mass extinction event, waiting for an enlightened period that never came. There are too many humans out there with low-voltage electric meat in their heads that cannot overcome their small-mindedness, poor mental machinery and unwillingness to step out of their comfort zones and security blankets of religion, politics, race, hatred, biases, fears, egos and irrational emotions. It takes daily courage to throw away a lifetime of bad, inaccurate, biased thought patterns, and there are not enough crayons on this planet to explain it to those incapable of knowing themselves.
If we manage to make a truly intelligent agent, one of the features will be the ability to “update” itself just like science updates itself with new discoveries. It will quickly outstrip the majority of human brains who operate on a minimalistic intellectual auto-pilot that we fail to feed, just like a Tamagotchi. Perhaps that is the ultimate step in human evolution — throwing away an organic brain that has been outmoded by the digital age and replacing it with a binary one that displays intense rationality. After all, this modern world with its whirlwind changes has proven Murphy’s Third Law of the Pencil — if critical thinking becomes too difficult, most people will stop doing it. That’s why we will have AI digital assistants.
Thanks for reading and good luck with your own Personal Digital Assistant.