While Larry Page does the yeoman's work of managing Google as CEO, his co-founder Sergey Brin gets to bring Philip K. Dick novels to life at Google[x], the company's lab of wildest dreams. The latest futuristic invention to emerge from the lab is Project Glass, augmented reality glasses that will take the place of your smartphone, allowing you to pull up maps, read text messages, make notes to yourself and sext your girlfriend without resorting to using your hands. The cutesy trailer teasing the glasses has already inspired parodies, such as "A New Way To Hurt Yourself" and this one injecting the video with inevitable annoying pop-up ads -- though this is probably more realistic than satiric:
Google Glasses could well go the way of Apple's ill-fated Newton, with a few geeky types grabbing pairs early on, and the rest of us waiting a few years until the more fashionable Google Contacts (or better yet, iContacts) come out. But Sergey Brin was spotted wearing a pair last night, reports Robert Scoble, and they don't look terrible. The hipster geek style might go over as well in Brooklyn as in Silicon Valley, at right.
Ryan Tate over at Gawker is calling them the "creepiest tech of the millenium." Tate's reasoning is that it will give Google access to "a stream of information about your private moments, with a video camera and microphone constantly pointed wherever you're looking."
Okay, mildly creepy, though not that much more so than what Google already captures about those of us who have Android phones and what Apple captures from iPhone users. What I think is actually "creepy" is how Google Glasses will accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state.
As I noted yesterday after a privacy-invasive trip to Reddit, we love spying on each other and capturing strangers' intimate moments. Smartphones have made it incredibly easy for us to turn the world into our own personal theater, to document and then broadcast what we (and those around us) see and hear and do. Oh, your roommate is having loud sex with his girlfriend in the other room? Sure, why not record the noises and send around the sound file so others can enjoy?
If we all start wearing glasses with cameras, the process of seeing and recording will become that much easier and possibly continual. I could imagine a feature -- which life loggers and quantified selfers would love -- that would allow you to record and save everything. Or, if you prefer not to accumulate that much private data about yourself, you could set your camera to continually record (and consistently erase) chunks of time -- it could be five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour, or a day, depending on your privacy settings. If something awesome (or horrible) happens that you want to save, you could instruct your Glasses to permanently store that file or upload it to your YouTube account. No more "Whoops, I didn't get my smartphone out in time to record that!"
Imagine how helpful this could be for reporting crimes. If you witnessed a boy being attacked in your yard, or a hit and run, or a robbery, you could immediately upload that file to police databases. Inevitably, we would all become watchmen, critical parts of the surveillance society. Alternately, law enforcement could use cell location tracking to figure out who was in a certain area at a certain time and get a warrant (or subpoena) for access to their vision logs.
And of course, any time we see something funny, embarrassing, sexual, disgusting, inspiring, or otherwise interesting, we will be able to more easily capture it and tweet it out. And once Google (or some other, braver company) inevitably introduces facial recognition to the system, we'll be able to include a stranger's Twitter handle.You see two people having sex in a parking garage? Sure, take a photo, tag them in it, and upload the photo to Facebook, captioning it "OMG."
It's creepy. It's awesome. And it's increasingly seeming inevitable.
