The Neural-Wave Quick Escape Manual 2036: A Field Guide to Adversarial Living in the Era of "Empathic" AIoT
This work addresses privacy concerns for elderly populations in AIoT care systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing critiques of surveillance through a speculative design approach.
The paper tackles the problem of domestic privacy erosion in AIoT care systems by presenting a design fiction set in 2036, where an empathic sensing platform forces elderly residents to perform legibility for basic freedoms, and it results in the creation of a diegetic artifact, the Neural-Wave Quick Escape Manual, which details adversarial tactics like Comply, Degrade, and Refuse to exploit vulnerabilities and reclaim privacy.
As the aging population faces a chronic care deficit, domestic care is increasingly recast as spectral governance. This paper presents a design fiction set in 2036, where the home is governed by Neural-Wave, a camera-free mmWave sensing platform that infers well-being from involuntary micro-motions. Through a set of scenarios, we illustrate how such empathic systems displace autonomy, forcing residents to perform legibility to regain basic freedoms. Our primary contribution is a diegetic artifact: The Neural-Wave Quick Escape Manual. Styled as an illicit guide for the elderly, it details adversarial tactics: structured around protocols to Comply, Degrade, and Refuse, that exploit signal processing vulnerabilities to reclaim domestic privacy. Through this artifact, we argue that in the era of empathic AIoT, privacy requires more than policy opt-outs; it demands adversarial literacy:the capacity to meaningfully obfuscate one's own data traces against an infrastructural jailer that calls itself care.