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Main Authors: Gu, Boyuan, Cheng, Shuaiqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19139
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author Gu, Boyuan
Cheng, Shuaiqi
author_facet Gu, Boyuan
Cheng, Shuaiqi
contents 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.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Neural-Wave Quick Escape Manual 2036: A Field Guide to Adversarial Living in the Era of "Empathic" AIoT
Gu, Boyuan
Cheng, Shuaiqi
Human-Computer Interaction
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.
title The Neural-Wave Quick Escape Manual 2036: A Field Guide to Adversarial Living in the Era of "Empathic" AIoT
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19139