Deep dives into human augmentation technology
On June 10, 2024 (WWDC), Apple announced Apple Intelligence—not as an app, not as a chatbot you visit, but as a system layer built into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. When AI is 'a tool,' you choose when to use it. When AI is 'part of the OS,' it quietly starts choosing *with you*. The question is simple: who are you when the default version of you is 'AI-assisted'?
OpenAI's GPT-4o achieved 232ms response latency—basically human conversation speed. When AI responds in real time, it stops feeling like software and starts feeling like presence. The ethical stakes: voice carries emotion, persuasion, and trust. Speed becomes a form of influence.
Meta rolled out AI with Vision to Ray-Ban smart glasses in April 2024—turning them from voice assistants into multimodal conversational devices that see and answer questions about your surroundings. The shift from 'searching' to 'asking your surroundings' is frictionless, but it raises a critical question: when glasses become a contextual AI platform, who protects the privacy of everyone else in the room?
On April 11, 2024, Humane's Ai Pin started shipping—a $699 'screenless' AI computer promising a phone-free future. But the moment it arrived, the gap between vision and daily usability became undeniable. The real lesson: ambient computing can't ship like a beta, and presence comes from certainty, not just removing screens.
On March 13, 2024, the EU AI Act approved landmark AI regulation that treats 'trust' as enforceable. When AI moves from ethics guidelines to binding law, everything changes: what products ship, what business models survive, and what harms become illegal instead of 'oops.'
Figure raised $675M and partnered with OpenAI to power humanoid robots with language models. The moment robots can reason is when mistakes become kinetic, accountability blurs, and 'labor shortage' becomes cover for control. What we demand now determines what we tolerate later.
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