Artificial Intelligence and Wearable Objects: A New Convergence

The hybridization between wearable technologies and artificial intelligence opens, in my view, a new era where the real and the virtual interweave until they merge.

Computing or the history of growing intimacy

The history of computing objects is fundamentally that of their progressive convergence with human uses. More precisely, I propose the idea that the history of computing merges with that of interfaces, of their capacity to create increasingly intimate bridges between man and machine. This contemporary evidence—we all carry in our pocket a mini-computer packed with sensors and connected to the global network—results from a long technological and conceptual maturation, which allows me to postulate a projection for our future. It is always useful to make projections, to prepare for change, even if the change that comes is not the one we had predicted, we have prepared ourselves to be able to move.

A decisive innovation in my opinion dates back to 2007, when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone. His historic keynote remains a model of staging convergence: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products. A widescreen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. And a breakthrough Internet communications device... These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we’re calling it iPhone.” This convergence, which seems natural to us today, then represented a major conceptual break. Let us remember, at the time our mobile phones worked very well, and this unusual new object seemed incongruous. Yet it truly changed our relationship to reality.

Steve Jobs himself had taken years to appropriate the interface innovations designed in the Xerox PARC laboratories in the late 60s, the windowing system, the mouse, the icons. The Macintosh, released in 1984, the first consumer computer equipped with these innovations, was initially perceived as a toy for graphic designers and architects, not as a serious tool. The “serious” computing of the time was paradoxically measured by the complexity of interfaces, reserved for specialists. Jobs had the brilliant intuition that the essential lay in usage, in the quality of human-machine interfacing. He had well retained Marshall McLuhan’s lesson from 1964: “We shape our tools and they, in turn, shape us.”

The revealing false leads of a quest

The technology industry has multiplied attempts to deepen this human-machine relationship, with varying fortunes. About ten years ago, pseudo-intelligent voice assistants (let’s remember Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Samsung Bixby) promised to respond to our daily needs through vocal exchange: ordering a taxi, booking a train, launching a playlist. Despite massive investments, these technologies never caused the expected tidal wave. Their limited understanding, their formatted responses and their extremely limited actual uses created more frustration than fluidity.

Before that, Second Life had embodied the promise of persistent virtual universes. Launched in 2003, this metaverse before its time generated considerable initial enthusiasm, companies, universities and governments opened virtual universes, events, meetings, concerts... Yet the experience ran out of steam fairly quickly, victim of its technical limitations and the absence of truly transformative use cases, to become, after the enthusiasm, a niche experience. Virtual reality met a similar fate with the Oculus Rift, then augmented reality with Google Glass, confined to niches of specialized users.

Facebook (now Meta) perfectly illustrates this dynamic of costly exploration. The company invested tens of billions in its metaverse between 2021 and 2023, going so far as to rename the entire company. The general public did not follow. Who owns virtual reality glasses today? A tiny minority. But these apparent failures actually draw a coherent trajectory, which appears in hindsight: each attempt actually lays a technological and conceptual brick, which will be necessary for the coming convergence. As Jaron Lanier, pioneer of virtual reality, observes: “Today’s failures are the components of tomorrow’s successes.”

ChatGPT or the unexpected catalyst

November 2022 marks a decisive turning point with the arrival of ChatGPT, the first generative textual artificial intelligence truly accessible to the general public. The term “generative” is crucial: this machine creates, like a human, from simple requests in natural language. It can write a philosophical essay, compose a poem, explain a complex concept, capabilities that simply did not exist three years earlier. And above all, openness to everything asked of it without limit, unlike voice assistants which were very limited. ChatGPT has no limit in its responses, even if it means inventing, “hallucinating” as we say, because it is a “generative” machine, not a “functional” one.

Generative AIs access the entirety of human knowledge available on the Internet (with the limitations this implies for non-digitized knowledge, which are very significant). Above all, it masters human language with troubling fluidity, responding to requests as a superhuman interlocutor might. This capacity is accompanied by the phenomenon of “hallucinations,” which goes hand in hand with its functioning: the AI actually invents, from the information it relates and logical reasoning it operates from these links. It is precisely because it invents that it is limitless. It is therefore absolutely normal that it hallucinates, it is intrinsic to its mode of operation, just as it is normal and even essential to our balance that we dream.

The continuous improvement of these systems, driven by engineers and machine learning, draws a horizon where the distinction between knowledge and creation, between truth and verisimilitude, becomes increasingly tenuous. This fundamental ambiguity is therefore not a bug but an intrinsic characteristic of these new intelligences, amplified mirrors of our own human capacity to imagine and construct narratives.

The synthesis: when the metaverse becomes the world

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement in July 2025 concerning his personal artificial intelligence project integrated into connected glasses represents the culmination of this long-prepared convergence. Meta is massively developing partnerships with major glasses manufacturers, and sales of these devices are already experiencing very rapid growth. These glasses allow not only augmented reality and conversation with AI, but also publishing on social networks, filming and adding contextual information to our visual environment.

This is no longer a simple voice assistant in the ear, as in the prophetic film Her by Spike Jonze (2013), but a multisensory augmentation, vision, hearing, and soon other senses. The future integration of brainwave capture, technology that already exists but has not yet been hybridized into glasses, promises an even more intimate interaction between human and machine. Philosopher Luciano Floridi speaks of “infosphere” to describe this environment where the distinction between online and offline progressively loses its meaning.

Meta’s much-criticized metaverse reveals here its true function: a life-size laboratory for modeling rich interactions between humans and virtual environments. The real world itself becomes the metaverse, enriched with a layer of knowledge and virtual interactions. The apparently vain research on virtual worlds actually constitutes the technical and conceptual foundation of this fusion. The physical world will be put in permanent interaction with its virtual vector representation, artificial intelligences being able to process only previously modeled information.

The erasure of boundaries: towards a hybrid reality

Technically, conceptually and philosophically, the distinction between real world and virtual world is inexorably fading. The two merge thanks to generative artificial intelligence that interfaces them. Through recognition and understanding of the physical environment, the machine models it and relates it to the virtual world that stores traces and gives meaning to the whole. We are witnessing the emergence of what philosopher Yuk Hui calls “cosmotechnics,” a new relationship between cosmos, morality and technology.

Google Maps already illustrates this dynamic: the application keeps (unless deactivated) exact traces of all our movements. This permanent modeling allows the system to better know us and optimize the interfacing of our life with the world, we all receive benefits from it, even if we don’t realize it. But with generative artificial intelligence, the challenge goes beyond simple human-machine interfacing to touch the very nature of reality. Our mobile phones and their GPS already profoundly modify our relationship to space and time, our ways of moving and communicating. We are now entering a new ontological regime.

It becomes essential in my view to understand that real world and virtual world become the two faces of the same reality, like the two sides of a sheet of paper indissociably linked. A physical, mechanical, biological world on one side; a world of digital information on the other. This duality is only the beginning of a deeper process: knowing that nature itself is constituted of data (DNA) and energy structuring matter, these two worlds are destined to merge in an increasingly intimate way.

Human sovereignty and political challenges

The major political challenge of this transformation lies in preserving human sovereignty in the face of the growing hegemony of large technology industrialists. These actors progressively become indispensable to our most primary experience of the world, for example simply moving on foot in the street in a place we don’t know, today requires connection and GPS... when you think about it twice, the dependence is so intimate... Thus wearable objects, particularly the connected glasses in development, outline through their convergence with AI not only the future of our experiences, but that of reality itself.

Mark Zuckerberg’s commercial promise, that of an augmented human, of a « meta-human », must be analyzed with critical lucidity. How to preserve what makes our humanity precious and unique in these new spaces? How to guarantee that our critical mind and our imagination can create in this augmented world more beautiful links, fewer wars, more openness to others, more intelligence and respect for nature?

It is not about rejecting these movements, it is sterile, because they are unstoppable anyway, but about understanding them deeply to learn to live with them and perhaps orient them towards desirable horizons rather than towards abysses for humanity, equality and respect. In the line of Paul Virilio, who warned about the necessity of understanding technological mutations to remain free and actors of our choices, we must cultivate an acute awareness of these transformations. As he wrote in The Vision Machine (1988): “When we no longer see the world except through an interface, we risk losing contact with what makes us human.” Our challenge is to navigate this transition while preserving our autonomy and our capacity for invention in the face of new powers that are emerging, which enter our intimacies often without us really noticing.