https://interconnected.org/home/2025/10/13/dichotomy Interconnected A blog by Matt Webb * About * Archive * Work Subscribe for $0 * Email * RSS feed * (What is a feed?) Unoffice Hours * Book a call * (What is this?) a.k.a. genmon * Bluesky * X/Twitter * Insta * Mastodon * LinkedIn Building the AI clock * Check out Poem/1 Cyborgs vs rooms, two visions for the future of computing 21.38, Monday 13 Oct 2025 Link to this post Loosely I can see two visions for the future of how we interact with computers: cyborgs and rooms. The first is where the industry is going today; I'm more interested in the latter. Cyborgs Near-term, cyborgs means wearables. The original definition of cyborg by Clynes and Kline in 1960 was of a human adapting its body to fit a new environment (as previously discussed). Apple AirPods are cyborg enhancements: transparency mode helps you hear better. Meta AI glasses augment you with better memory and the knowledge of the internet - you mutter your questions and the answer is returned in audio, side-loaded into your working memory. Cognitively this feels just like thinking hard to remember something. I can see a future being built out where I have a smart watch that gives me a sense of direction, a smart ring for biofeedback, smart earphones and glasses for perfect recall and anticipation... Andy Clark's Natural Born Cyborgs (2003) lays out why this is perfectly impedance-matched to how our brains work already. Long term? I've joked before about a transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet that would walk my legs to work and this is the cyborg direction of travel: nootropics, CRISPR gene therapy, body modification and slicing open your fingertips to insert magnets for an electric field sixth sense. But you can see the cyborg paradigm in action with hardware startups today trying to make the AI-native form factor of the future: lapel pins, lanyards, rings, Neuralink and other brain-computer interfaces... When tech companies think about the Third Device - the mythical device that comes after the PC and the smartphone - this is what they reach for: the future of the personal computer is to turn the person into the computer. Rooms Contrast augmented users with augmented environments. Notably: * Dynamicland (2018) - Bret Victor's vision of `a computer that is a place,' a programmable room * Put-that-there (1980) - MIT research into room-scale, multimodal (voice and gesture) conversational computing * Project Cybersyn (1971) - Stafford Beer's room-sized cybernetic brain for the economy of Chile * SAGE (as previously discussed) (1958-) - the pinnacle of computing before the PC, group computing out of the Cold War. And innumerable other HCI projects... The vision of room-scale computing has always had factions. Is it ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), in which computing power is embedded in everything around us, culminating in smart dust? It is ambient computing, which also supposes that computing will be invisible? Or calm computing, which is more of a design stance that computing must mesh appropriately with our cognitive systems instead of chasing attention? So there's no good word for this paradigm, which is why I call it simply room-scale, which is the scale that I can act as a user. I would put smart speakers in the room-scale/augmented environments bucket: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, all the various smart home systems like Matter, and really the whole internet of things movement - ultimately it's a Star Trek Holodeck/`Computer...' way of seeing the future of computer interaction. And robotics too. Roomba, humanoid robots that do our washing up, and tabletop paper robots that act as avatars for your mates, all part of this room-scale paradigm. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Rather than "cyborg", I like sci-fi author Becky Chambers' concept of somaforming (as previously discussed), the same concept but gentler. Somaforming vs terraforming, changing ourselves to adapt to a new environment, or changing the environment to adapt to us. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Both cyborgs and rooms are decent North Stars for our collective computing futures, you know? Both can be done in good ways and ugly ways. Both can make equal use of AI. Personally I'm more interested in room-scale computing and where that goes. Multi-actor and multi-modal. We live in the real world and together with other people, that's where computing should be too. Computers you can walk into... and walk away from. So it's an interesting question: while everyone else is building glasses, AR, and AI-enabled cyborg prosthetics that hang round your neck, what should we build irl, for the rooms where we live and work? What are the core enabling technologies? It has been overlooked I think. --------------------------------------------------------------------- More posts tagged: * glimpses-of-our-cyborg-future (15 posts) Auto-calculated kinda related posts: * Resting Posthuman Face (28 Jun 2023) * Computers that live two seconds in the future (9 Jun 2023) * Rambling thoughts about cyborgs and emotions (20 May 2020) * The Overton window of weirdness is opening (21 Jun 2024) * Let's invent new interfaces, not new products (25 Feb 2021) If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here's the link. Thanks, --Matt. Most recent posts * I love the smell of autopoiesis in the morning 15 Oct 2025 * Cyborgs vs rooms, two visions for the future of computing 13 Oct 2025 (This post) * Parables involving gross bodily functions 10 Oct 2025 * The Campaign for Vertical Television 1 Oct 2025 * I like AI slop and I cannot lie 26 Sep 2025 * Filtered for bird calls and catnip 19 Sep 2025 * Get your Claude Code muzak here 18 Sep 2025 * What I think about when I think about Claude Code 12 Sep 2025 * Pneumatic elevators 4 Sep 2025 * The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean 29 Aug 2025 * Free idea: auto reply as a service 22 Aug 2025 * Me talking about AI elsewhere 14 Aug 2025 Continue reading: All in 2025 streak New posts for 290 consecutive weeks (see: blogging tips) New? 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