Smartwatches, AI, and the Three Faces of Technological Determinism: A Marxist Critique of Digital Capitalism

This study explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in smartwatches through the critical lens of Karl Marx’s theory of technological determinism. In contrast to functionalist and adoption-centered analyses, the research problematizes the ideological and socio-economic structures underpinning wearable technologies. The objective is to reinterpret smartwatches not as neutral innovations but as artifacts embedded in digital capitalism—functioning simultaneously as autonomous agents, social constraints, and political instruments. Employing a qualitative, conceptual methodology grounded in Marxist historiography and critical media studies, the research synthesizes canonical texts with contemporary scholarship on AI, surveillance, and labor. The results reveal that AI-powered smartwatches reinforce capitalist imperatives of productivity, data commodification, and self-discipline, ultimately contributing to behavioral governance and user alienation. This study offers a dialectical framework that exposes the myth of technological neutrality and reframes wearable AI as a site of ideological reproduction. It contributes to communication and technology studies by advancing a historically grounded critique of how digital devices shape, and are shaped by, class dynamics, capitalist rationality, and power structures.