Spy glass
On live demonstrations, the rule of caveat emptor, and why "smart" glasses might make wearers stupid even if their facts are exactly right
It may not be especially tasteful to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but watching what happens (and how people react) when things go wrong can be a tough temptation to resist -- as long as we know that nobody faced real peril from the incident. Nobody died when Mark Zuckerberg's live demo of Facebook's AI-powered glasses went sideways. That creates a pretty good permission structure for the rest of us to point and laugh.
■ Buggy demonstrations aren't necessarily a reason to run away from a product (though they might ratchet up a sense of "caveat emptor"). But if it comes to light that erroneous assumptions are guiding the creators, that might be another story.
■ Zuckerberg, who still controls a majority of voting shares in Meta/Facebook and thus is empowered to do anything he wants with the company, has hyped the glasses by saying that those who don't get them may fall to a "significant cognitive disadvantage". Those are strong words.
■ Even assuming that artificial intelligence goes through several more generational-scale improvements, there's a very real hazard in assuming that it would be "cognitively" advantageous to have it beamed into one's retinas all day. There are certainly discrete tasks for which glasses acting as a permanent heads-up display could be advantageous: It might be nice, for instance, to be able to read a book while taking a walk outside.
■ But real human cognition is characterized by incomplete thoughts, sentence fragments, and abstractions that we imagine taking shape in the world around us (it's one reason why people often break eye contact when telling a story -- they're reconstructing fragments of memory in the imagination). If we're not careful to leave lots of room for those incomplete thoughts, we're likely to bungle the whole process of thinking.
■ Trying to gain "cognitive advantage" by dragging a computer into the loop, in part to make more of those thoughts seem complete, is a surefire way to miss the point. The real impairment may come from introducing a digital interlocutor with no sense of when to shut up.
