Today in the NYC subway I saw two young women sitting across from each other, trying to hold a conversation. With all the noise of the subway car, it didn’t look easy.
In not so many years from now, when everyone has wearables, that will no longer be a problem. You will be able to modulate your hearing, much as you will be able to modulate your vision.
You will be able to reduce ambient noise, enhancing the aural signal of whatever you happen to be looking at. In effect, you will have a kind of portable whisper gallery.
You will even be able to have subtitles across your vision, if you’d like. This would be particularly useful if your friend is speaking Chinese, and you don’t speak Chinese.
People from that time will look back on our own age in wonder, marveling at all of the basic capabilities that we don’t have. They will ask themselves “How did those people ever manage to get through a day?”