In the most recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and MG Siegler agreed that the smartphone will be difficult to overthrow as the dominant method of computing. Something unthinkable would need to happen for us to leave the phones at home in favor of watches, earbuds or pendants, Her-style. So, even if SoC and batteries improve to such extent that we could fit the 2040s equivalent of an M5 chip into a MacBook, iPhone and AirPods equally, and all with great battery life, people would still reach out for their phones first.
This wasn’t the first time I heard the thesis, and it always sounded about right. I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to be impatient when chatting with Siri. This isn’t about its “lack of” intelligence: although I had only used ChatGPT’s voice chats as a novelty when demoing it to elderly family members, even they needed a few more seconds to answer specific questions than my patience would allow. So why is that?
Well, my impatience would suggest that bandwidth is key, more specifically our own bandwidth to process information. Humans are visual creatures: much of our own brain’s neural pathways are tied up in receiving and processing information from the 6 million cones and 120 million rods contained in the approximately 2,200 square millimeters of our retinas. The next sense down in the number of receptors is not even close: touch, with about 4 million somatosensory receptors packed in the average 1.79 square meters — or 1.79 million square millimeters — of body surface area. That is two orders of magnitude more sensors packed into three orders of magnitude less space in retina (sight) versus skin (touch). What about sound, which is competing with sight as the interface of record? There are around 15,500 hair cells in each cochlea for 31,000 total — not even close. [Note: This is why writing has been the defining achievement of our species, condensing the ineffable into something we can quickly process, and why I will never get tired of reading histories of notebooks and paper. ] But you don’t need to know any of this to have experienced dreams. When was the last time you remembered a particularly nightmarish smell or sound when you were asleep?
So if the optimal way for computers to communicate with us is via retinal inputs, does it not make the most sense to attach most of the local computing machinery onto the interface?
But what about our outputs? Unless you were born on Krypton one wouldn’t expect anything shooting out of your retinas to interact with the environment. Well, here is my main uncertainty in the smartphone-as-the-ultimate-device hypothesis: could you not, on an infinite timescale, wear contact lenses that could beam in information to you as efficiently as possible? Are the Apple Vision Pro and whatever creepiness Meta is out with now not steps towards our corneal computing future? Perhaps, but perhaps not, and the interaction with whatever is beamed into our eyes will be the next limiting factor.
All our movements are planned in the prefrontal cortex and executed in the precentral gyrus of the frontal cortex. A lot of that surface area is dedicated to our hands, as the creepy but to the best of our knowledge accurate cortical motor homunculus shows. [Note: Fun fact about the brain: it’s plastic. In that, it can and does get rearranged as circumstances warrant, and the extent of the rearrangement can be drastic. But receptor numbers are what they are, so any broad changes to the general population would have to take… millennia? Dozens of millennia? Certainly longer than the life span — not to mention attention span — of the average S&P 500 company. ] The side by side representations of the sensory and motor homunculi twins is particularly striking in showing how important our hands are to our sense of self. Now, another prominent feature they have are large tongues and lips, much of it in the service of producing sound, so it is not a surprise that voice controls exist, and not just for the times when our hands are otherwise occupied. Yet what the homunculi show and what any cat parent will attest is that humans are, to the outside world, mostly a pair of hands attached to some rather bizarre squishy elements. Hey, we may as well own it!
The most serious consequence of this state of affairs, much to my disappointment, is that smartphones as we know them are here to stay so there isn’t much point in hobbling my own computing experience with black and white displays, “feature” phones and the like. While I would have loved, in my project to ditch Apple, not to replace my iPhone with anything else “smart”, reason says to try and find a true alternative. GrapheneOS looks promising, and by the time my current phone kicks the can or passes on something else may come along. Here’s hoping.