In my novel, a soldier built for precision meets a woman who breaks him. Not with violence, but with emotion. Jay, the soldier’s body and mind are engineered for control. Cassie, my protagonist’s power comes from chaos. When her pendant triggers an electromagnetic pulse that scrambles his neural augmentations, he experiences something alien: feeling. For the first time, he doubts his thoughts, not recognising them as his own.
I wrote that scene thinking about what it means to be human when the body becomes editable. Jay is the logical endpoint of a design philosophy obsessed with optimisation. Cassie, on the other hand, represents the messy, analogue world of instinct, empathy, and adaptation. They’re not enemies so much as evolutionary prototypes, each exposing the other’s limits.
We are, I suspect, standing at a similar junction. The next stage of human-tech evolution won’t just be about how much we can integrate with machines, but whether we should. Some will choose to augment, editing cognition, mood, and memory to become frictionless. Others will choose to adapt, leaning deeper into the uniquely unpredictable mess of emotion and perception that machines still struggle to mimic.
Just this week, there was a story that caught my eye… excuse the pun. Surgeons at Moorfields Eye Hospital implanted a micro-chip behind a patient’s retina, allowing them to see letters and shapes again after years of blindness. The chip captures light through a pair of AR glasses, translates it into signals, and sends them to the brain. It’s extraordinary and very exciting, a miracle of human ingenuity and machine precision. But it also drew me to writing this article. When the body repairs itself through circuitry, are we witnessing recovery, or the first quiet steps of a new kind of evolution?
What will happen though, when technology doesn’t just improve our lives, but rewire it?
The Augmentation Temptation
The promise of augmentation has always been control. Faster thought. Better memory. Mood stability on demand. Why adapt painfully over generations when you can upgrade in minutes? In UX terms, it’s the ultimate optimisation: eliminate bugs, enhance performance, version humanity 2.0. But emotional systems don’t work like code. They metabolise chaos, remove uncertainty, and you don’t get a better human—you get a narrower one.
Jay’s augmentations were meant to remove hesitation, what in my book’s world is called QR, or Question Rationale Removal. The upgrade deletes doubt by cutting the cognitive loop that asks “why?”. It makes you decisive. It also makes you dangerous.
As a designer, I see echoes of that everywhere. Recommendation algorithms that remove exploration. Interfaces that pre-empt choice. AI tools that “assist” creativity until you forget what it felt like to find something yourself. Augmentation isn’t just implants and neural code, it’s happening every time a system edits the shape of our attention.
Adaptation: The Other Path
If augmentation is about control, adaptation is about capacity. It’s slower, riskier, less glamorous yes, but it teaches. Cassie’s strength isn’t in precision; it’s in her ability to absorb shock, to bend without breaking. When the pendant she carries triggers the EMP, she doesn’t understand the physics, but she reads the room, the pulse, the fear. She feels her way through. Jay can calculate; Cassie can sense.
That’s the essence of adaptation. It’s emotional intelligence as survival strategy.
In UX, we often talk about “walking in the user’s shoes.” True adaptation means doing that literally, by understanding not just the goal but the emotional landscape users inhabit. When I design for banking interfaces, I can’t assume people are thinking clearly about risk or future consequences. A user taking out a loan might be exhausted, distracted, or overwhelmed by anxiety. Every prompt, every confirmation step, every alert isn’t just friction, it’s an opportunity to support sound decision-making, or to inadvertently amplify stress.
To adapt is to design with humility. It’s accepting that users aren’t predictable inputs but evolving beings with histories and hormones and hope.
The Split Is Already Here
We like to imagine “the future of humanity” as a single timeline, but it’s already diverging. On one side are those racing toward augmentation: neuro-interfaces, mood optimisers, algorithmic assistants. The goal is seamlessness. On the other are those pulling back toward slower, more mindful design: digital minimalists, ethical technologists, speculative designers asking what should not be built.
It’s not good vs evil—it’s efficiency vs empathy.
Every new platform, every wearable, every biometric sensor will force a micro-choice: augment or adapt. The question isn’t whether we’ll merge with tech, but how much of ourselves we’ll trade in the process.
What Sci-Fi Gets Right
Good sci-fi doesn’t predict, it prototypes.
When I wrote Jay’s malfunction, I wasn’t writing about circuitry. I was writing about every designer who’s ever broken something by trying to perfect it. Every user who’s felt alienated by an interface that makes them feel inadequate. Every coder who forgot that code is a language, and languages are meant to be spoken, not imposed. The best speculative fiction reminds us that evolution doesn’t always mean progress. Sometimes it’s a detour. Sometimes it’s a crash.
We’ve been building toward this moment since the first wearable counted our steps and whispered, you could do better. The whisper has grown louder. It now says, you could be better. And if you can’t, maybe the system will do it for you.
That’s augmentation’s quiet tyranny: it disguises itself as help.
UX Lessons from the Edge
When we test interfaces with real people, we’re glimpsing micro-evolutions in how humans process the world. The colours that soothe today might irritate tomorrow. The gestures that feel intuitive now will feel clumsy in a decade. UX, at its core, is an evolutionary discipline. We observe behaviour, adapt design, release, observe again. We are watching human’s adaptation to technology in real time, from dial-up and the very first website, to personal computers, social media, smart phones, wearables, crypto, AI, quantum… and on.
But there’s a deeper responsibility hiding there. If our work shapes behaviour, we are shaping evolution. That’s not melodrama, it’s maths. Billions of daily micro-interactions add up to a new baseline for attention, emotion, and trust. The ethical question isn’t whether we can build tools that think for us. It’s whether, when they do, we’ll still recognise the thought as ours.
Between the Lines of Code
Every designer knows the moment when something clicks—the layout feels balanced, the flow intuitive. But there’s another moment we rarely talk about: when a design feels alive, when it doesn’t just function but feels. That’s the boundary between augmentation and adaptation. One optimises for efficiency, the other for empathy. One reduces error, the other embraces surprise.
I sometimes wonder if we’re building toward a new kind of divide. Not between rich and poor, or connected and disconnected, but between those who want to feel more and those who want to feel less. Or put another way, those that want to think more, and those that want to think less.
The augmenters will chase control. The adapters will chase connection.
The Emotional Economy
We’ve already turned attention into currency, emotion is next. When we can measure stress, arousal, empathy in real time, interfaces will start responding to emotional states dynamically. It sounds compassionate—systems that know when you’re tired, overwhelmed, or sad. But emotion-aware tech is also persuasion-aware tech.
As designers, we must decide what kind of empathy we’re coding for: one that supports, or one that sells. The coming split isn’t just biological or technological, it’s ethical. Augmenters will optimise empathy for performance. Adapters will cultivate it for understanding. Both will call it progress.
Where I Stand
If Cassie represents adaptation and Jay augmentation, then maybe the answer lies between them. Jay’s precision needed her chaos, and her chaos needed his structure. Together, they find a kind of equilibrium—a reminder that even as systems grow more intelligent, humanity’s edge may still lie in what refuses to be standardised. So, maybe the future isn’t asking us to choose between augmenting and adapting. Maybe it’s asking us to remember why we wanted to evolve in the first place.
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I’m Abi Fawcus. UX designer, coder, and speculative fiction author exploring the emotional cost of the human-tech evolution. Why not say hi.