The more savvy users will have a better experience, exerting more control using free (or crowd-funded) tools which block ads. The mainstream companies will continue to make the computing experience an ad-filled privacy nightmare for everyone else.
Also like now is the "Wargames" aspect of it - the computing landscape is already such an ad-filled privacy nightmare that, "The only winning move is not to play".
There's a line in the Ready Player One movie where the big bad is discussing how much of the human visual field they can fill with ads before inducing seizures. I was expecting this years ago, as Google Glass 2.x, but nobody has yet been able to get the size and cost down for untethered headgear.
There are enough people who like, enjoy breathing normal air and seeing plants.
Maybe if it becomes a brain implant at some point. I hope to be long gone before then.
This has been a big fear of mine since I started studying CS. Implants that are still not fully proven safe, but create a massive productivity gain. This might make the choice to get a sketchy implant or be unemployed.
I don't, and life goes on as before
Asia and European sound a lot more far gone in this area though and I feel like the days are numbered here.
As a German: Why? All scam-app checkins during the pandemic were also doable via paper (I refused to install the damn app), pretty much everything I can do on my phone, I can also do by paper (which I have to for my health insurance, damn TK is not only the most digitally progressive health insurance, they also seem to be the only app existing on Android with an almost uncircumventable root detection). The only exception would be my bank, but that’s because I chose a neobank which requires a smartphone to even sign up.
which? If they require a works phone they will give you one. Leave it at home and use it only for work.
I think it's pretty clear where that trajectory is already headed. Proprietary Apps are not the web, and your adblock browser extensions are irrelevant when everything relevant is an App.
FTR this is not the future I want, it's just the future I see.
We need a new and better Mozilla analog to champion the web browser and push things forward to where the best way to develop the best Apps is the open Web. It's a huge problem when companies clearly vested in a closed-App walled-garden future dominate the browser market.
That's simply unsustainable long-term. It happens to work today that you can trivially block them at the network level, because they're still unsophisticated about how ads are delivered, in this still mixed open-Web-transitioning-to-closed-Apps world.
Long-term, ad-serving becomes more sophisticated, in-band, and indistinguishable from any other App data over an encrypted stream with the App vendor and/or walled-garden provider, or just bundled with the now-normalized constant App "updates" without the need for network access when displaying them at all.
You're on the losing side of an arms race when everything's closed.
Even if you prefer living in walled gardens, preserving the open Web escape hatch does a lot of heavy lifting in the checks and balances department. If it's entirely deprecated by society, the walled gardens will get exponentially worse with their increased leverage.
I'd like to mention, that I don't prefer closed gardens and out of principle don't use anything app only. My phone is for calls, the bath, and my bed. Plus the rare traveling.
We already have AR/VR (XR) being built into the current web (W3C webxr), and people building out Web based AR. Take a look at 8th Wall.
There will be a long transition period where webxr have the chance to shine and prevent the wall garden future of private apps.
And even if they don't share it- they can still use it for selling ads on their platform.
The pandemic opened the door to making a piece of technology a mandatory requirement to participate in society. It used to be possible to live without a smartphone, now you really need to be able to read and produce QR codes¹.
Why couldn't the same thing happen with AR, considering how expensive it is for governments and companies to put displays and audio announcements everywhere?
¹: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/04/my-lif...
Myself I raise a stink every time; I don't like the tracking implications. If businesses insist on it, I try to take my business elsewhere.
I used one QR menu during coronavirus and then started going elsewhere. To be honest restaurants during the pandemic were awful anyway, far more fun to just have friends over for dinner.
I have a fairly varied social life, if anything I probably drink too much. This doesn't match up with reality to me.
Unavoidable means just that - cannot be avoided. To avoid using QR codes doesn't even involve trying.
I think people sometimes forget that you can inconvinience a waitress without being an asshole about it (they are there to provide service) and that being able to be a customer is important enough that most businesses would prefer staff spend time helping you.
Sure they would prefer you have a smartphone, and it may be less convinient but that doesn't mean they can't work to accomondate you.
I used to be in a social circle where a couple people claimed they would rather die than ever own an ebook. I wish I had written down which people they were so I could RemindMe in ten years to see if they were enjoying the afterlife or not.
When we are in the early adoption phase there are always late adopters who expect to be never adopters. But peer pressure happens, and some products actually listen to complaints and improve the product to overcome reservations.
And then everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
Not all fads get adopted. AR is in my opinion still a tech before its time, which makes it a fad - for now - but not necessarily forever. Cellphones and particularly smart watches are a form of ambient technology that have caught on, and I think it's only a matter of process shrinkage and battery tech before it happens. Say another 7-10 years for battery density to double again. Early ebooks were objectively as bad as current or last generation VR equipment. Nobody was going to adopt that. It's a matter of connecting the dots.
If you don't like the idea of everyone in AR, that's fine. Then I recommend you start now to participate in environmental and conservation special interest groups, because there is a day coming when philosophers, ascetics, and people who touch trees on purpose are the main demographics of people who actively reject augmentation for augmentation's sake. There are loud opinions in each of those groups, and they have merit.
And frankly we could use a few more science-minded tree huggers to dilute the conspiracy theorists.
I have no plan to ever buy one of these headsets.
If the streets of London became Minority Report-esque e.g. holographic loud projections, I can just move five or ten miles down the road to somewhere slightly less urban. It'd be significantly less expensive too.
I mean, almost all tube station adverts are still just paper billboards, clearly something is preventing them from being screens.