Collective wristwear: the world in the hands of humankind

Abstract

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems 'tsunami' are the 'spring tide' of some 5.3 billion mobile phone platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2013, and an assessed market potential for 300 million smart watches in 2014 [1]. This technological and market evolution raises questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning superorganism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "superorganism" [3], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own.