The world of Apple, ambient AI, and privacy

Once upon a time, horses had horns, illness crept upon us, treatments were based on superstition, and lives were short. My, how things have changed. Today, you can be warned of early signs of sickness by your smartphone and other wearable devices, including the Apple Watch and (more recently) AirPods.

Apple has updated those two latter products, enhancing their existing health-focused tools with hypertension detection/alerts on the watch and heart rate-sensing on AirPods 3. (Apple’s own white paper suggests hypertension monitoring could alert up to 1 million hitherto undiagnosed sufferers about their condition.)

Apple and its ambient AI

What’s interesting about these features is the extent to which they rely on on-device artificial intelligence to work. The hypertension detection tool, for example, relies on photoplethysmography (PPG) data, gathered over time by shining light into the skin and measuring the light reflected in return. This information feeds an algorithm (developed across 100,000 study participants) that identifies whether you are at risk, then lets you know.

There are many other health-focused features on both devices that use AI to give you useful information. But what ties all of these tools and services together is their ambience. You see, rather than thrusting artificial intelligence in your face (even though it is quite literally putting AI inside your ears with those new AirPods), Apple is opting for an approach in which technology augments your daily life. 

Unflooding the zone

Apple CEO Tim Cook famously alluded to this when he explained how Apple wants to build products that connect you to others rather than wrapping you in a tech bubble. The idea is to maintain your own connection with the reality around you while also augmenting your day with tools, features, and services that benefit you. 

In the case of hypertension monitoring on AirPods, that’s means flagging potential heart issues. But if you scratch beyond the surface at nearly every AI feature Apple is bringing to market, it becomes clear that building tech solutions that get out of the way is critical to the approach. 

In Apple’s model, AI does not interfere with your perceived reality or your experience of exploring it, but is there in the background to help you in an ambient way (through health sensors, for example), while also being available to assist in specific tasks on request. As I see it, those specific requests can be seen as moments when AI is being asked to help in an active, rather than an passive, way.

Apple and the human AI interface

But this idea of delicate, human-centered augmentation is really just a 21st century evolution of Apple’s long-held human interface design principles.

Apple wants to build technologies that help you get things done — “bicycles of the mind” — as Steve Jobs once put it. When it comes to AI deployment, the logical extension of that way of thinking is evidenced by background tools, health-supporting features, and the innate capacity to run less ambient AI functions on request. That’s a discreet technological augmentation in which humans retain control.

What about privacy?

Then there’s privacy. Apple’s privacy commitments are allowed to exist — and that can’t be taken for granted, given the energy governments seem to be putting into undermining these protections — help reassure us that our data, including AI-gathered information, will not be used against us in some way. 

These protections help ward off surveillance advertising. It’s, after all, plausible to imagine “personalized” ads appearing on digital advertising screens on every corner of every street you travel down, based on your unique user data. Just because you’ve had a hypertension warning doesn’t mean you want your eyes exposed to an endless supply of keep fit, anti-cholesterol drinks and life insurance ads as you go to your local mall, after all.

What happens if?

My concern is that once the bulwark of privacy and personal security is removed, what then? When a population is accustomed to the convenience of wearable AI, at what point will the greed of surveillance-at-a-profit business models stop? As the AI juggernaut penetrates every part of life, where is the political will to define privacy rights?

Where, in other words, do people become information to be monitored, managed, and monetized? Where, even, is the conversation to define the answers to these questions?

We know Apple wants to offer world class tech while also protecting human dignity and privacy. But with competitors and government forcing its hand, perhaps it’s time for a grown-up conversation to define internationally supported privacy standards. This would at least define the market before, not after, the data is collected.

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