Reactions to Google Glass

Google Glass is in the news a lot: it’s what they call “wearable” computing. Computing on things you wear, like glasses or watches. Like the smartphone, the Glass has a camera, GPS, Internet connectivity and understands voice commands. Glass (like spectacles) is always pointed at whatever it is you are looking at. Which is why you can give it instructions like “Glass, take a photo”. Or ask for info or ask for directions. With Glass, Google even managed to project info/directions on your, er, glasses without blocking your vision!

Ok, so that’s the gist of the device itself. Only 8,000 units in circulation (to handpicked applicants) and yet there have been strong reactions. The reaction about Glass’s impact on knowledge/education was:

“The idea is that we will all be better off if we’re always connected to the web, always on, and have uninterrupted and instantaneous access to it and humanity’s “knowledge.”…I think, though, that is a terribly deluded and shallow understanding of what it means to “learn” about something.”

Others worry about its impact on privacy: unlike conventional devices, you wouldn’t even know when someone is taking pics/videos/recording, they argue. The next worry is whether anonymity is lost? After all, the camera sees, and soon some facial recognition technology could identify even complete strangers for you (Such technologies already exist; but neither Facebook nor Google want to use them…yet. But for how long will it be before someone crosses that Rubicon? Didn’t Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, once say “Google’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”)

Then there is the impact on social etiquette. Scott Adams described it as “spatial smearing”, as in when two people are in the same room but one is mentally some place else. Glass would take that to a whole new level:

“At least with smartphones you can tell when someone's mind is elsewhere. But how happy will you be when you are having a conversation in person and your friend keeps glancing up to watch his little projection screen inside his glasses?”

Adams always likes to provoke you to make you think. In another blog, he wrote (only half-jokingly):

“I see the iWatch as the next phase in our evolution to full cyborg status. I want my Google glasses, iWatch, smartphone, and anything else you want to attach to my body. Frankly, I'm tired of being nothing but a skin-bag full of decaying organs. I want to be the machine I was always meant to be. That prospect excites me.”

Is Adams’ (second) view going to the majority view? Will Glass go the way Helen Keller way: “The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next”?