Apple didn’t simply shrink the iPhone and strap it on your wrist, Tim Cook insisted. “Because you wear it, we invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate.”

Intimate?

The Apple Watch won’t just vibrate when you choose someone to text; you can reach out and vibrate that person’s watch from across the globe. “We thought hard on how to enable a new form of communication,” Apple’s Kevin Lynch said onstage earlier this month. “We’ve created something called digital touch.”

Hold the phone – or, I guess, the watch, as the case may be: Isn’t “digital tapping” kind of creepy? Did we learn nothing from Facebook’s years-long failed experiment with the “poke”? And most alarmingly: won’t a future of long-distance, digital touching further corrode whatever shred of human interaction we have left in this world of Snapchat and webinars?

This is far from the first time a tech company has built in so-called “haptics” – transmitting a programmed response by way of physical sensation has long been a feature (that you probably turn off) on the iPhone and devices like the Xbox controller. But the Apple Watch is way more than another device that rumbles when you swipe it. Not only can it capture and record your heartbeat – it would seem to liberate us from the burdens of geography, fulfilling the prediction of the
philosopher Albert Borgmann, who once wrote that “technology ... would annihilate time and space”.

Maybe that’s a stretch, but with so much time spent looking at screens, we’re quickly forgetting how to interact face-to-face.

Larry Rosen, the author of iDisorder, explained to me that when humans speak in person, we have access to a myriad of interpretive cues – verbal, facial, waving hands and more – that help us communicate. When we move to phones, we lose out on important human cues (yes, even if we’re using FaceTime). As you might expect, transitioning to text messages removes the potential to read faces or understand body language, forcing us to rely on grammar and, you know, emoji.

In comes haptic technology, removing our need for words, allowing us to “touch” our friends and leaving them to interpret what such a tap might mean. With fewer and fewer cues, we rely more heavily on self-created narratives that are based on social norms and prior experience. It all leaves an increasing – and frightening – amount of communication up to the wildly imaginative interpretation.

Think waiting for those ellipses to turn into a text message is stressful? It is. Anxious about your boss reading too much into your email subject line, or your crush not being able to read into your charming sarcasm? Haptics could force us to wrestle with the ambiguities of one wrist tap versus two.

And what happens when we actually can touch someone, in person? Do we revert to tapping them on the iWatch because it’s more efficient? Will haptic taps become the hug of the future? This may sound absurd, but many are familiar with the temptation to text someone who is in the same room, instead of walking over to talk to them – or at least a generation of kids who grew up on smartphones is. Seduced by the ease of technological communication, we lose the face-to-face interaction that teaches us how to empathize with those around us.

Our reliance on technology often leads to a decline in the humanness of our experience – unless, of course, we consider the potential consequences of its ubiquity. Rosen urged me to be hopeful, suggesting that “society always figures out where technology fits in”, before we fully embrace that innovation. Before we become comfortably numb.