The “Whisperverse”: The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head

Within the next few years, an AI assistant will take up residence inside your head. It will do this by whispering guidance into your ears as you go about your daily routine, reminding you to pick up your dry cleaning as you walk down the street, helping you find your parked car in a stadium lot, and prompting you with the name of a coworker you pass in the hall. It may even coach you as you converse with friends and coworkers, giving you interesting things to say that make you seem smarter, funnier, and more charming than you are. These will feel like superpowers. 

Of course, everyone else will be “augmented” too, creating an arms race among the public to embrace the latest features and functions. This is the future of mobile computing. It will transform the bricks we carry around all day into body-worn devices that see and hear our surroundings and covertly whisper useful information and friendly reminders at every turn. 

Most of these devices will be deployed as AI-powered glasses because they give the best vantage point for cameras to monitor our field of view, though camera-enabled earbuds will be available too. The other benefit of glasses is that they can be enhanced to display visual content, enabling the AI to provide silent assistance as text, images, and realistic immersive elements that are integrated spatially into our world. 

This future is the result of two technologies maturing and merging into one: artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Their combination will enable AI assistants to ride shotgun in our lives, observing our world and giving us advice so useful that we’ll quickly feel like we can’t live without it. Of course, there are serious privacy concerns, not to mention the risk of AI-powered persuasion and manipulation, but what choice will we have? When big tech starts selling superpowers, not having these abilities will mean being at a disadvantage socially, professionally, economically, and intellectually. 

“Augmented mentality”

I’ve been writing about this future for over 30 years, first as a researcher at Stanford, NASA, and the US Air Force, and then as a professor, author, and entrepreneur. When I started working on the technology we now call “augmented reality,” that phrase didn’t exist, so I described the concept as “perceptual overlays.” These days, there is a similar lack of words to describe these AI-powered entities that will sit on our shoulders and coach us through our day. I often refer to this emerging branch of computing as “augmented mentality” because it will change how we think, feel, and act. 

Whatever we call this technology, it is coming soon and will mediate all aspects of our lives, assisting us at work, at school, or even when grabbing a late-night snack in the privacy of our own kitchen. If you are skeptical, you’ve not been tracking the massive investment and rapid progress made by Meta on this front and the arms race they are stoking with Apple, Google, Samsung, and other major players in the mobile market. It is increasingly clear that by 2027, this will become the big new battleground in the mobile device industry. 

The first of these devices is already on the market — the AI-powered Ray-Bans from Meta. While currently a niche product, I believe it is the single most important mobile device sold today. That’s because it follows the new paradigm that will soon define mobile computing. It has onboard cameras and microphones that feed a powerful AI engine and pumps verbal guidance into your ears. Just the other week at Meta Connect, the company showcased new consumer-focused features for these glasses, like helping users find their parked cars, translating languages in real-time, and naturally answering questions about things you see in front of you. 

Of course, the Meta Ray-Bans are just a first step. The next step is to visually enhance your experience as you navigate your world. Meta unveiled their prototype Orion glasses that deliver high-quality visual content in a form factor that is finally reasonable to wear in public. The Orion device is not planned for commercial deployment, but it paves the way for consumer versions to follow. 

The future of AI assistants

So, where is this all headed? By the early 2030s, I predict the convergence of artificial intelligence and augmented reality will be sufficiently refined that AI assistants will appear as photorealistic avatars that are embodied within our field of view. No, I don’t believe they will be displayed as human-sized virtual assistants who follow us around all day. That would be creepy. Instead, I predict they will be rendered as cute little creatures that fly out in front of us, guiding us and informing us about our surroundings. 

In 2020, I wrote a short story (called “Carbon Dating”) for a sci-fi anthology in which I refer to these AI assistants as ELFs, or “Electronic Life Facilitators.” I like thinking of them as elves because that is what they will become in our lives — helpful little entities that prompt you with the exact cargo capacity of a shipping container when you just can’t remember the information in an important meeting or beings that take the shape of a flying fairy that guides you through Costco to find the three items on your shopping list as efficiently as possible. These features will not just be helpful — they will make our lives seem magical.

On the other hand, deploying intelligent systems that whisper in your ears as you go about your life could easily be abused as a dangerous form of targeted influence. And when this is coupled with the ability to visually modify the world you see around you, these AI-powered glasses could unlock the most powerful tools of persuasion and manipulation ever created. For these reasons, I sincerely hope that industry leaders do not adopt an advertising business model when commercializing these AI-powered glasses.

I also hope they consider how these products will shake up social dynamics, as they can change how people interact face-to-face in creepy ways (the short film Privacy Lost shows examples). Call me old-fashioned, but the last thing I want is for big tech to compete for marketing dollars based on how efficiently their cute little elves can talk me into buying things I don’t need or believing things that are not in my best interest. The potential for dystopian outcomes is far too great. To enable the magical benefits while protecting our privacy and agency, I recommend that policymakers quickly focus on this emerging market to define the playing field such that large companies like Meta, Google, and Apple can compete on how magical they make our life, not how effectively they can influence it.