After developing a facial-recognition app for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and doxing random people, two former Harvard students are now launching a startup that makes smart glasses with an always-on microphone.
That’s not true, but this kind of devices has been subject to extensive thought experiments in science fiction and philosophy and found lacking actual use.
It’s like a watch implant. You need to know time, looking at tower clocks and wall clocks isn’t too convenient. Wrist watches and in general portable watches were a thing of beauty, but also quite useful for military commanders, sailors and pilots. But this progression doesn’t lead you to implanting a watch into your hand, so that you’d always have it.
Similarly, this progression doesn’t lead humanity to needing such devices, or honestly much of modern computing. It’s just a personal computer. Even smartphones are honestly a less than convenient form factor, approaching minimal usable size.
All this is just a way to spend resources in some other way than actually building a unified humanity with access to good medicine, education, connectivity, food, political and labor rights. That’s not even because those powerful people are evil, - I think it’s more because doing anything real with such implications can get you killed. Even a supposed rich psychopath isn’t usually evil, doing a good thing weighs about as much as doing a bad thing with the same amount of resources for them. We live in a time when those resources are actually present in the world, - 100 years ago this wasn’t yet true. Which makes improving anything for real a dangerous endeavor, because every such improvement destroys someone else’s base.
A bit like a capitalist version of late USSR’s deadlocks.
That’s not true, but this kind of devices has been subject to extensive thought experiments in science fiction and philosophy and found lacking actual use.
It’s like a watch implant. You need to know time, looking at tower clocks and wall clocks isn’t too convenient. Wrist watches and in general portable watches were a thing of beauty, but also quite useful for military commanders, sailors and pilots. But this progression doesn’t lead you to implanting a watch into your hand, so that you’d always have it.
Similarly, this progression doesn’t lead humanity to needing such devices, or honestly much of modern computing. It’s just a personal computer. Even smartphones are honestly a less than convenient form factor, approaching minimal usable size.
All this is just a way to spend resources in some other way than actually building a unified humanity with access to good medicine, education, connectivity, food, political and labor rights. That’s not even because those powerful people are evil, - I think it’s more because doing anything real with such implications can get you killed. Even a supposed rich psychopath isn’t usually evil, doing a good thing weighs about as much as doing a bad thing with the same amount of resources for them. We live in a time when those resources are actually present in the world, - 100 years ago this wasn’t yet true. Which makes improving anything for real a dangerous endeavor, because every such improvement destroys someone else’s base.
A bit like a capitalist version of late USSR’s deadlocks.