This life-changing piece of health tech is getting cheaper — and more advanced
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice.
You can imagine a future where you wear earbuds that are the interface for your voice assistant as well as your lifeline on a loud plane. Vox/Getty Images
Hearing aids, like canes or orthopedic shoes, are something you don't think about a lot when you're young. But maybe you should.
You probably either know someone who needs hearing aids, or you'll need them some day yourself. About 30 million people in the United States, aged 12 and older, have hearing loss in both ears, and about two-thirds of people end up with hearing loss, which can range from mild to severe, by their 70s.
But talking to your parents or grandparents about getting hearing aids can be tough — I've done it. They might not like the idea of sticking things in their ear canals or confronting the difficult realities of aging and health. They surely shy away from the price tag of hearing aids, which can cost thousands of dollars and are not covered by insurance or Medicare.
But plugging tiny and exorbitantly expensive speakers into your ears isn't the only way. Your mom might already own hearing aids without even knowing it.
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Hearing aids have never been more accessible — or futuristic. In April, a company called Nuance started selling glasses that double as hearing aids thanks to microphones and beam-forming speakers built into the frame. Although at $1,200, they're not cheap, they cost far less than a pair of prescription hearing aids, which tend to range from $2,000 to $7,000.
Hearing aids have never been more accessible — or futuristic.
You can also buy something that's legally considered a personal sound amplification product (PSAP), which is not designed to treat hearing loss but does make things louder. Some of them can play music and handle phone calls too. In the age when earbuds are ubiquitous, these devices appeal to all ages.
'It's good that we're seeing people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, talking about it, because it's totally changing the paradigm for them of engaging in hearing care earlier,' Nicholas Reed, a faculty member at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told me.
I'm a millennial, but I've also dealt with hearing loss my entire life. A bad stretch of childhood ear infections left me mostly deaf in one ear and pretty spotty in the other. I learned to read lips as a teenager and avoid conversations at loud parties in college. Some surgery in my 20s brought me closer to normal, but I could still use a little help.
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I've spent the past few weeks trying out the Nuance glasses in various settings. They're remarkable, not only because they feel almost indistinguishable from my regular glasses but also because I forget they're hearing aids. Made by EssilorLuxottica, the company behind Ray-Ban and dozens of other glasses brands, the Nuance glasses employ some of the same technology that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses use to play music and help you talk to AI. And while the Nuance glasses don't currently offer the option to stream audio, they do help you hear what your friend is saying in a loud bar.
The AirPods Pro 2, which retail for $250, work equally as well. After Apple announced last fall that a software update would unlock an accessibility setting — it's appropriately called Hearing Aid — I started using it all the time, toggling between listening to podcasts to ordering cold brew in a crowded coffee shop. In instances where I may have needed to ask people to repeat themselves in the past, I hear them fine the first time. I just have to wear AirPods all the time, which makes the glasses solution even more appealing.
For most people, hearing loss typically starts in your 50s and gains momentum in your early retirement years. If you've ever been to a busy restaurant with your parents or grandparents, you know this can be alienating for the person left out and frustrating for the hearing person, too. The social isolation can lead to loneliness and anxiety, which can hasten cognitive decline and lower life expectancy.
Nevertheless, neither traditional clinical hearing aids or the newer category of devices are easy fixes. Once you start wearing any sort of hearing aid, it takes time to adjust, and you might need help tweaking the sound as you get used to it. That's one reason why so many people avoid it — only one in five who need hearing aids actually have them. You can't put them in your ears and immediately have perfect hearing. Your brain adjusts over time, and so it may take weeks or months to adapt to the new frequencies hearing aids help you hear.
Related How technology has inspired neuroscientists to reimagine the brain
Still, it's a worthwhile project.
'Sensory input is so key to our existence, but we just sort of overlooked it for so long,' Reed said. 'It's something that's vital to your existence and how you connect with other people.'
It's not clear how the latest hearing aid innovation will move the needle on adoption. Even though over-the-counter hearing aids have been available since 2022, when the FDA implemented new regulations for the devices, it's still an uphill battle to get people to wear them.
'Sensory input is so key to our existence, but we just sort of overlooked it for so long.' — Nicholas Reed, faculty member at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine
'We are not seeing large increases in hearing aid uptake since over-the-counter hearing aids have become available,' said Tricia Ashby, senior director of audiology practices at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). 'And I have to say that mimics other countries who had over-the-counter hearing aids before the US did.'
Given the fact that the older people who need them most are potentially less likely to try the latest technology, it might still take a few years for over-the-counter hearing aids to go mainstream. Given the precedent set by companies like Apple and Nuance, though, it's possible that more devices will add hearing assistive features to existing products.
You can imagine a future where you wear earbuds that are the interface for your voice assistant as well as your lifeline on a loud plane. You might have glasses that project walking directions onto your field of view and help you hear which direction traffic's coming from when you have to cross the street. These kinds of features together only get more important as you get older and need a little more help.
'We are in an age now where you're thinking about optimizing aging, and how do you do it?' Reed said. 'And it's things like this.'
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That and the simple fact that Americans love independence and immediacy. Perhaps in the absence of available professional medical advice and guidance, we're turning to these gadgets for quick and constant reassurance. Combined with googling symptoms or closely following wellness influencers, it almost feels like we're better off taking our health into our own hands. But health tracking in its current form is not a science or even an art. It's certainly not the near future of the American health care system, as some MAHA followers might make you believe. Health tracking, at its core, is a self-driven experiment in better living for those who can afford these products and have the time to spare to comb through their own data. In some ways, it's just an expensive hobby. Like running or perfecting your smoothie recipes, it can be good for you. Wearing a smart ring or a glucose monitor alone won't make you feel better.
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Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren't so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films. But let's be real: It's the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That's never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is 'the formation of human persons.' In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what's getting created and recreated by the learning process. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! This vision of education — as a pursuit that's supposed to be personally transformative — is what Aristotle proposed back in Ancient Greece. He believed the real goal was not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate the virtues: honesty, justice, courage, and all the other character traits that make for a flourishing life. But because flourishing is devalued in our hypercapitalist society, you find yourself caught between that original vision and today's product-based, utilitarian vision. And students sense — rightly! — that generative AI proves the utilitarian vision for the humanities is a sham. As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, 'You're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?' It's a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You're in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. I know, I know: Lots of students will say, 'I don't have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!' It's totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don't fully see the value in it now. Your job is to be their Aristotle. For the Ancient Greek philosopher, the mother of all virtues was phronesis, or practical wisdom. And I'd argue there's nothing more useful you can do for your students than help them cultivate this virtue, which is made more, not less, relevant by the advent of AI. Practical wisdom goes beyond just knowing general rules — 'don't lie,' for example — and applying them mechanically like some sort of moral robot. It's about knowing how to make good judgments when faced with the complex, dynamic situations life throws at you. Sometimes that'll actually mean violating a classic rule (in certain cases, you should lie!). If you've honed your practical wisdom, you'll be able to discern the morally salient features of a particular situation and come up with a response that's well-attuned to that context. This is exactly the sort of deliberation that students will need to be good at as they step into the wider world. The breakneck pace of technological innovation means they're going to have to choose, again and again and again, how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. The best training they can get now is training in how to wisely make this type of choice. Unfortunately, that's exactly what using generative AI in the classroom threatens to short-circuit, because it removes something incredibly valuable: friction. AI is removing cognitive friction from education. We need to add it back in. Encountering friction is how we give our cognitive muscles a workout. Taking it out of the picture makes things easier in the short term, but in the long term, it can lead to intellectual deskilling, where our cognitive muscles gradually become weaker for lack of use. 'Practical wisdom is built up by practice just like all the other virtues, so if you don't have the opportunity to reason and don't have practice in deliberating about certain things, you won't be able to deliberate well later,' philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor told me last year. 'We need a lot of cognitive exercise in order to develop practical wisdom and retain it. And there is reason to worry about cognitive automation depriving us of the opportunity to build and retain those cognitive muscles.' So, how do you help your students retain and build their phronesis? You add friction back in, by giving them as many opportunities as possible to practice deliberating and choosing. If I were designing the curriculum, I wouldn't do that by adopting a strict 'no AI' policy. Instead, I'd be honest with students about the real benefit of the humanities and about why mindless AI cheating would be cheating themselves out of that benefit. Then, I'd offer them two choices when it comes time to write an essay: They can either write it with help from AI, or without. Both are totally fine. But if they do get help from AI, they have to also write an in-class reflection piece, explaining why they chose to use a chatbot and how they think it changed their thinking and learning process. I'd make it shorter than the original assignment but longer than a paragraph, so it forces them to develop the very reasoning skills they were trying to avoid using. As a TA, you could suggest this to professors, but they may not go for it. Unfortunately, you've got limited agency here (unless you're willing to risk your job or walk away from it). All you can do in such a situation is exercise the agency you do have. So use every bit of it. Since you lead discussion sections, you're well-placed to prompt your students to work their cognitive muscles in conversation. You could even stage a debate about AI: Assign half of them to argue the case for using chatbots to write papers and half of them to argue the opposite. If a professor insists on a strict 'no AI' policy, and you encounter essays that seem clearly AI-written, you may have little choice but to report them. But if there's room for doubt about a given essay, you might err on the side of leniency if the student has engaged very thoughtfully in the discussion. At least then you know they've achieved the most important aim. None of this is easy. I feel for you and all other educators who are struggling in this confusing environment. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some educators are suffering from moral injury, a psychological condition that arises when you feel you've been forced to violate your own values. But maybe it can comfort you to remember that this is much bigger than you. Generative AI is an existential threat to a humanities education as currently constituted. Over the next few years, humanities departments will have to paradigm-shift or perish. If they want to survive, they'll need to get brutally honest about their true mission. For now, from your pre-paradigm-shift perch, all you can do is make the choices that are left for you to make. Bonus: What I'm reading This week I went back to Shannon Vallor's first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting . If there's one book I could get everyone in the AI world to read, it would be this one. And I think it can be useful to everyone else, too, because we all need to cultivate what Vallor calls the 'technomoral virtues' — the traits that will allow us to adapt well to emerging technologies. New Yorker piece in April about AI and cognitive atrophy led me to a 2024 psychology paper titled 'The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect.' The authors' conclusion: 'We suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.' Come again? Yes, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and watch Netflix, but sometimes thinking about a challenging topic is so pleasurable! To me, it feels like running or weight lifting: Too much is exhausting, but the right amount is exhilarating. And what feels like 'the right amount' can go up or down depending on how much I practice. Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker recently published an essay in Noema provocatively titled ' AI Is Life .' She reminds us that evolution produced us and we produced AI. 'It is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life,' she writes. 'Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.' To be clear, she's not arguing that tech is alive; she's saying it's an outgrowth of human life, an extension of our own species.
