Fitness trackers 20 years from now
&gt; <i>I&#x27;m trying to imagine a future, 30-50 years from now...</i><p>I can only hope it&#x27;s a future in which we collectively realized that smartphones, smartwatches, smartglasses, smartypantstoilets, smartgloves, smartdiapers, etc, were <i>a bloody well idiotic idea</i> and that we&#x27;ve come to our collective senses and realized that they were never what they promised to be, but had, within a few years of launch, turned into just more ways of monopolizing attention for a quick venture capital and IPO payout.  Perhaps not the hardware manufacturers, but at least the way the hardware was used.<p>More realistically, those are likely to be dim memories of the past, back before capitalism ran the planet into the ground, and took most of our technology stacks with it.  Modern tech stacks are complexity, piled on complexity, built on a few stacks of complexity, built on broken hardware that&#x27;s overly complex in an attempt to gain the performance required to run the teetering stacks on top of it (all the uarch vulns, DDR4 Rowhammer is a nice touch on top, etc).<p>You&#x27;ll note that neither of those paths involve us running around with the FitBit 2050 gathering... whatever it is it thinks it ought to gather.  The way things are going, probably nothing more useful than Covid tracking stuff.  &quot;You were in proximity with 1.7 potential individuals who may have been infected with Covid, please quarantine for the next two weeks.  <i>confetti</i>&quot;<p>It would be nice if we had some of our current technology, that open data standards had taken root and we could decide how we wanted to use the stuff, pay appropriately and be paid appropriately for our devices, attention, etc.  But that&#x27;s just not the way things are going, and I fear that&#x27;s not the way things are going to go, under any reasonable future.  There is far, far too much money and &quot;Well, but, see, if you destroy the market you can monopolize it!&quot; money floating around for the near to moderate future to see that future happen.  I mean, a bunch of our current companies are literally based on &quot;We will use the venture capital money to undercut everyone else, drive them out of business, and then be the monopoly!&quot;  Uber, Lyft, [insert the food delivery service of the week here], the various scooter services, and the list goes on.  They&#x27;re running into the brick wall of, &quot;Wait... what do you mean, we&#x27;re not going to accomplish that?  You mean we have to <i>turn a profit</i>?&quot;  I&#x27;ve talked to people who have started taking taxis again, because at least they&#x27;ll show up, unlike the Sharing Economy Rideshare App of The Future services that weren&#x27;t remotely pandemic-proof.<p>We&#x27;ll see.  But I would predict that fitness trackers, in 20 years, are a big pile of ewaste, &quot;... ugh, yeah, you know, it&#x27;s not worth the hassle to get that data out...,&quot; and broken promises.  And hopefully not being actively worn by then.