Wearable Technology Is Already Outdated

The Future Culturalist couldn’t help but chuckle when he saw the first promotional photos of everyday folk rocking Google Glass, which you’ll be able to purchase sometime this year so long as you can cobble together $1,500. Besides the fact that the device is even less fashionable than a Bluetooth headset — it makes the wearer unflatteringly resemble both Geordie La Forge and a member of the Borg Collective — Google Glass is outdated before it even hits store shelves.

The reason why it’s already outdated has nothing to do with what Google Glass is capable of. No doubt it allows you to perform any number of nifty tasks such as handlessly checking your email, Facebook News Feed and stocks; watching Game of Thrones while pretending to pay attention to your girlfriend; and recording every second of your dismally boring life.

Simply put, Google Glass is painfully outdated because in the year 2099, we won’t wear technology — we will be technology.

Very soon, within the next half-century, it will be rare for a middle- to upper-class human in Western society not to have some sort of cybernetic, prosthetic or other type of technological augmentation. Self-replicating nanobots will swim through our bloodstreams like so many microscopic tadpoles, optimizing our oxygen transfer rate and unclogging blocked arteries. Memory chips will boost our brainpower. Chemical dispensers might regulate our dopamine and serotonin levels, thereby eliminating or at least lessening the effects of anxiety and depression.

All of these augmentations, furthermore, will be able to communicate with each other, the Internet (or some future iteration of the Internet) and you. Your entire body will be humming with wi-fi signals. If a group of nanobots detects a cancerous cell, you’ll instantaneously be informed via cybernetic implants (telepathically, almost), similar to how your virus detection software informs you when it intercepts a malicious program. If a memory chip goes down, you’ll feel it as palpably as you feel hunger or a change in your mood.

Best of all, with retinal implants we’ll be able to accomplish much more than what Google Glass offers, without having to look as if we walked off the set of a low-budget sci-fi movie.

After so many years of wearing the hideous VISOR, Geordi La Forge was finally able to get his own retinal implants in Star Trek: First Contact. At the rate technology really improves, we need not wait as long as he did.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me I’ve been wearing a lady’s hair clip??”

Below you can check out a promotional video for Google Glass.