Key Takeaways
It's pretty normal these days to see someone walk around with a pair of wireless earbuds plugging up their ear holes, but thanks to pass-through audio, we expect that they can still hear what's going on. However, what if those buds could really make you hear what's going on? Beyond what your mortal ears are capable of?
AirPods Are Now Hearing Aids
Apple announced that its AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 offer clinical-grade hearing aid functionality as part of an overall hearing health feature set, including a hearing test to figure out if you need the help to begin with. So now, even if you didn't know you had hearing loss, you can get evaluated and treated in one fell swoop. Now, I'm not ready to say that you can skip the visit to an audiologist yet, but the idea that a commercial pair of headphones can help restore someone's hearing is amazing to me, and while AirPods aren't the cheapest buds around, compared to the cost of purpose-built hearing aids, Apple might as well be giving them away.
Apart from acting as hearing aids, the AirPods 4 and Pro 2 also introduce something known as "Adaptive Audio" listening mode. This basically dynamically, and intelligently, mixes noise cancelation and audio passthrough. So the earbuds decide what sorts of noises you should be hearing, and how loud they should be. This means it's not an either-or situation, but almost like mixed reality for your ears.
Why Stop at Human Levels of Hearing?
So, if earbuds like these can help restore hearing loss and bring someone's hearing back up to the hearing norm, why not use the same technology to push beyond it? Why not give us the ability to hear things that are far away, or amplify the sounds of low-volume objects in our environment? Imagine the same voice isolation technology that works for calls helps you hear someone speak in a noisy environment.
Even better, there are already earbuds that translate languages, but it would be great if that could be integrated into mainstream products like AirPods too. With recent trends towards local AI processing on phones, this is yet another enhancement to our regular hearing that could be normal in just a few years.
There's always a bit of controversy when technology promises to enhance some aspect of our bodies, but these are just wearable devices, so it would be like sunglasses or binoculars, but for your ears.
A Sneaky Path to Human Augmentation?
In sci-fi, human augmentation is generally about prosthetic limbs and implants, but we've been doing it as long as we've been human. Clothes make us more resilient to the cold, we have shoes that let us run further and faster, and a helmet is just a skull augmentation. So, instead of making a whole Iron Man suit, we've been augmenting ourselves beyond what a bare human body can do for some time.
Earbuds that give you superhuman hearing powers are just one small example of this. I think we're about to see augmented reality glasses finally become practical and affordable, which means people might wear them like they do regular glasses now. That's going to offer all sorts of augmentation both to what we can see, but also to what we know about our environments.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses
Embraced by the next generation of culture makers, its journey continues with AI-enhanced wearable tech. Listen, call, capture, and live stream features are seamlessly integrated within the classic frame.
As each device we wear or carry on our bodies becomes more advanced, capable of making something about us better, then eventually they could all add up to something that significantly makes us more capable than we would otherwise be. For now, I'm just looking forward to hearing like Superman!