Everybody talks about the interruptions that smartphones present, but it seems like little is being done about it aside from the occasional call for self-control. There seems to be a new app on your phone every few weeks that's begging to litter your notification tray.

It might surprise you to learn that much of the wearables research in the 90s was about making your computer less obtrusive, not more. And the solution seems counter-intuitive: make the computer more present in your life, to the point where it fades away and becomes a part of you. The shift from "user" to "cyborg" lowers the barriers of operation, as the interface disappears completely.

Richard DeVaul, a major researcher in low-impact wearable UI, actually works at Google X, presumably on Project Glass. In the early 2000s he developed the "Forget-Me-Not" memory glasses, with "subliminal cueing" to prompt a user's memory using quick-flashing LEDs. He also worked on more traditional screen overlays like context-aware shopping lists and appointment reminders.

"I can improve your performance on a memory recall task by a factor of about 63% without distracting you," claimed DeVaul, "in fact without you being aware that I'm doing anything at all." That's a bold promise, but if it's true I hope DeVaul brought a little bit of that subliminal magic to his Google work.

Meanwhile, Thad Starner took his own approach to an always-with-you memory augmentation. Called the "Remembrance Agent," Starner and a colleague built a hyped-up Emacs setup to search his documents and emails constantly as he took notes with a one-handed Twiddler keyboard. He could pull up information related to whatever he was doing in the real world, letting him resume conversations years later, and work as a sounding board for other deep thinkers. He actually got fast enough with his wearable that he could start speaking a sentence before he knew where it would go, adding in facts from Remembrance as fast as he could supply them from his own meat brain.

Unfortunately, we can't all be MIT Ph.D-types with 70 words-per-minute-per-hand. Much less understand Emacs. But I think what Thad proves is that there's a wide gulf between "wait a minute, let me look that up" on a phone, and constant information access on your eyeball.

But constancy isn't just about helping your present memory. At Microsoft Research, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell have been refining the practice of "lifelogging" for over a decade. Bell records everything he does, both virtual and IRL, and Gemmell has been building the software that helps make sense of it.

The idea is to improve long term recollection of events, but also to improve reflection on events:

"Instead of the rosy-colored concept of the time I spent with my daughter," says Gemmell, "I now have a record and can look at it and say, 'Oh jeez, could I have handled that better?'"

Devices like Nike+ and Fitbit let us reflect on our history of fitness, both for a day and for years of activity, and mixing in cameras, sound recording, location data, a day's worth of internet communication, and manually-entered meta data, could make for a very interesting (or very disturbing) record of how you live your life.

More recently, Abigail Sellen and Steve Whittaker have actually argued against recording too much. Useful information is better than exhaustive information, because the term "digital memories" is a bit of misnomer: what's more important is what actual, brain-stored memories your digital records can spark. A computer that's always with you knows enough to serve you only what you need, only when you need it. "Synergy not substitution," as Sellen and Whittaker put it.

As for now, Thad Starner's notes on a conversation are better in the moment than Gordon Bell's two hour playback of it. A "constant" computer doesn't require you to zone out and "compute," but instead, by the virtue of its intimacy, it can work with the minimum amount of input and offer the minimum amount of output. A close friend, instead of a stranger.