Smart Glasses Are Ushering In An Anti-Social World w/ Chris Gilliard

0:00 What their need is, is for you to have a computer on your face, not for you to be be able to do X, Y, and Z better. It's not to liberate you from your screen. They want you to be a constant source of data, not only a constant source of data in terms of how you are ingesting the world when you wear this technology, but also the extent to which you would be in constant communication with AI.

0:54 As I'm sure you've seen, all of the major tech companies seem to have decided that smart glasses are their next big thing. Meta is rolling out its new display glasses in partnership with Luxotica. You know, it has its Ray Bans and now it's Oakley's. Google has this new partnership for Android XR with Warby Parker.

1:12 Apple is apparently working on some smart glasses, and you know, there are plenty of other companies doing this as well. They seem to have decided that this is the moment to push to get screens in front of our faces constantly, not just on our phones, but right in the lens of the glasses that so many people wear day in and day out.

1:31 And I don't know about you, but to me, this is a pretty dystopian vision of the future. And it's no surprise at all that they're trying to finally make the smart glasses happen. And of course, using generative AI as part of the justification to do that. And so when I was thinking about who I wanted to talk to to understand more about the wider implications of this push by the major tech companies, by the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Sergey Brins of the world, I can think of no one better to talk to than Chris Gilliard.

2:01 Chris has been on the show in the past, of course. I think he is one of the most insightful critics of the tech industry going today. And of course, his work on luxury surveillance means that he is perfectly positioned to talk about this effort to expand the tech that we're wearing, the cameras that are on our faces, you know, everything that is associated with this.

2:21 And you will not be disappointed by the insights and the criticisms that he provides in this episode. He makes it abundantly clear that we need to be pushing back against this vision for what our future should be, where we're all wearing these glasses, where so many people are being recorded, where the surveillance infrastructure that these companies have already created is taken yet another step forward and reduces our ability to ever escape the net of surveillance that they are creating.

2:49 So, really, like, what is there to say other than that, other than you need to listen to Chris's insights? And of course, you should be following him over on Blue Sky as well if you're not already doing that. To me, he was an essential follow on Twitter. And when he made the move over, I was like, I gotta follow Chris.

3:05 I cannot lose the insights that Chris provides me because I just think he's fantastic. So, with that said, if you enjoy this week's conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.

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3:34 You can join supporters like Danny from Phoenixville, Ollie from San Diego, Rakesh from Kingston in the UK, and Toby in Los Angeles by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Chris, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.

3:51 Thank you. It's as always great to be here.

3:54 It's been too long since you were on the show last, and I was like, man, I need my fix of Chris Gileard. And so now is the moment, right? Because I feel like me and I'm sure so many more of the listeners like appreciate so much your like feed of criticism of all of this bullshit on social media. But it's also nice to, you know, get a long form on a topic like this because you're so knowledgeable on all of this stuff, which is why I was like, you know what?

4:22 All these companies are doing this smart glass shit. Chris needs to come back on the show and tear this apart for us. Yeah. I mean, I I relish the opportunity. Let's start in the obvious place. I feel like we had defeated smart glasses. You know, 10 years ago, a little more than that. Google rolls out its Google Glass.

4:39 It really wants to make sure that we're sticking computers on our faces and you know makes a big push to try to make that the future in that moment. You know, Sergei Brynn is showing it off and thinks it's so cool. And obviously it gets ridiculed, right? You know, people are called glass holes, and ultimately it ends up in like, you know, the dustbin of history.

5:00 And now, 10 years on from that, smart glasses are everywhere again. The companies are pushing it again. What is going on here? And what do you make of the return of smart glasses a decade after Google Glass?

5:11 Yeah, I mean, I I love the example of Google Glass because it offers us an opportunity to think about what rejection of a technology looks like. Smart glasses are I think they're a great example of a profoundly antisocial technology. Now, unfortunately, we have several current examples, but I think it smart glasses are one of them.

5:32 They were roundly rejected, and you know, it seemed for a moment that they would not come back. But Meta is out with their Ray Bans, Amazon is supposedly developing a version, Apple now wants to get into the game. There's a heavy push by a lot of these large companies to get you to put a computer on your face.

5:55 It's so depressing, right? Like, I don't know, there's there's computers in so many places, the last place they should go is like directly in front of my eyeballs. But it has been like really interesting to see that push. And I keep wondering like if the kind of campaign that was levied against Google Class can be replicated.

6:15 Because I feel like one of the really distinct differences between now and then is like, okay, on the one hand, we are much more used to like having screens and even cameras everywhere now than I think we would have been 10 plus years ago. But one of the things that was quite distinct, I feel like, about Google Glass is that it was quite ugly, right?

6:33 It w it was easy to ridicule it. It really stood out if someone had it on their face. And it feels like the companies have really learned from that this time around, where like they're explicitly going to the Luxoticas, you know, the Ray Bans and the Oakleys, or you know, Google has a new partnership with Warby Parker, you know, trying to make it like fashionable, right?

6:52 To have this on your face so it tries to blend in, other than the little black camera holes like on the side or in the middle or whatever. I wonder on uh how you like think about those differences and you know whether the companies are as vulnerable now to the campaign that was levied against Google Glass 10 years ago.

7:10 Yeah, so I have I have a lot of ideas about this. I I think first the aesthetics I think are really important. I mean, this is what I talk about a lot when I talk about luxury surveillance, that the the goal in part is to make these things sort of blend in, make them seem cute or cool or fashionable in ways that try to make it appealing or less ugly.

7:33 In doing some of the research for the book, I happened upon an article by Sarah Roberts and Sephia Noble that talked about Google Glass and how they tried really hard to market it as a luxury item to like drum up appeal for the glasses. I mean, it didn't work, like some rich people bought them, but they were roundly rejected.

7:55 That is one of the lessons that these companies have learned, you know. So they are capable of learning. To have them be so obviously a surveillance device, for my taste, they always look like a scouter from Dragon Ball Z for people who uh you know remember that anime. But to have them be so obnoxious and obvious was a signal to everyone about what was going on.

8:22 And so in most cases now, they are may do appear just like sort of typical or normal eyewear, perhaps a little more bulky. That is uh yeah, it's a piece that they've they've learned to change. I think that rejection is gonna look somewhat different, and and that's for a couple reasons. One is it's not obvious always obvious, you know, that someone is wearing these glasses.

8:46 The other thing is I I think what they've learned is there's a strong push by these companies to have everyone wear them. And what I mean by that is for instance, Amazon is planning to have a version that say delivery drivers will wear. Now, Amazon says that this is gonna shave seconds off of delivery times so that if a driver is wearing the glasses, they can receive turn-by-turn instructions.

9:12 And so if they're getting off an elevator, and instead of them mistakenly turning left and you know, delivering your package a few seconds longer, you know, than they anticipated, the glasses can instruct them to turn right and you know, sort of optimize the route, right? Like it's Taylorism's final form.

9:32 You're relying on some like really specific maps of like every building in the world.

9:38 You know, yeah. I mean, and also, yeah, like that's it's it's gonna help create that. Like the glasses are both, you know, producing surveillance and and the output of that surveillance also is helping helping to optimize. I mean, that's what they say. But part of that, I think, is why it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to reject them.

9:59 So that there'll be lots of cases where people might be wearing them where they don't have a choice. You know, for instance, like we're starting to see Axon, which is like the body cam company, they are now pushing body cams for like hospital workers and for retail workers. You know, I can see a future where instead of body cams, now there's Facebook glasses or some version meta Google, but there's some version of these things that workers are encouraged or forced to wear.

10:33 And so rejection is going to be a little bit different. So that the way that people who are wearing them were ostracized when they showed up in public, you know, when they came to a bar, when they went to a concert, when they were at the gym, you know, in a locker room, things like that will be a lot more difficult because there'll be a segment of the population who are wearing them because it's part of their uh requirements for fulfilling their job.

11:00 Now that's not to say that we cannot reject them. I mean, I I I think there's still some strategies we can learn from that. And I think, you know, kind of shame and ostracism in terms of people conducting antisocial behavior. I think we need to bring that back, to be honest. You know, I mean, I I think that the idea that tech companies promote that people are should be able to engage in profoundly antisocial behaviors and like we just have to put up with it.

11:29 I think if we look around, then we can see some of the results of that, and they're not good. So I think we should we should bring back some of the ways that we rejected those technologies.

11:38 No question. And I want to come back to that notion of like the strategies that we can use to push back on it this time around, like a little bit later in our conversation. So we'll get to that once we have discussed a bit more of what these companies are doing in this moment as well. And so, you know, I want to take what you're saying there about this really grim future that you are laying out.

11:59 We're already in a pretty grim present, but like, you know, layering on this additional form of surveillance and recording that is being enabled by these supposedly, you know, kind of fashionable glasses or whatever that are embedded with all this tech sounds terrible. But I think it's also worth understanding like what the companies are actually pushing in this moment, right?

12:19 Like more tangibly. So, you know, we saw some announcements from Meta recently about what they are promoting, and we've heard things from Apple and Google, and you mentioned Amazon as well. Can you give us a bit of a lowdown on like what the companies are actually presenting right now and how they're trying to sell this product to the public?

12:36 Yeah, so one of the biggest things is the claim that the glasses will liberate you from your screen. We've seen, you know, the last 10, 15 years of smartphones, and I think people have begun to recognize, again, and I I'm gonna use this term, I've I've used it a ton already, but we've seen sort of the antisocial effects of people pulling out their phones during the course of their days, right?

13:01 So someone pushing a stroller while they're looking at their phone, right? So instead of enjoying their time with their child in the park, you know, they're looking at their phone. I mean, there's countless examples that we could point to, like we all know them at this point. One of the persistent claims in terms of the luxury end of it, right?

13:18 The people who would willingly adopt these glasses is that it will liberate you from your screen. Now that's not true, but we'll we can come back to that.

13:27 Liberate you by sticking a permanent screen right in front of your eye. Yeah.

13:31 Right, right. The second thing is that it's somehow sort of onerous to pull out your phone. So if you're at a thing where you would want to capture video, for instance, or get turn-by-turn instructions or something like that, that it's onerous to pull out your phone and do these things. So glasses will make that easier.

13:54 And I think the third thing, and there's several more, but I I think these are the biggest ones. The third thing is that it is a a portal for constant interaction with AI. And so that instead of interacting with AI through a screen, you know, a chat bot or or what have you, instead of interacting it with it through a screen, it can now be consistently in your ear.

14:19 Now it can again give you turn-by-turn instructions, and I'm I'm speaking like this is what the companies would say. Give you turn inter turn-by-turn instructions, it can give you affirmations, it can you know look up something for you, it can interpret what you're seeing. It will allow AI, gen AI to be your constant companion.

14:38 Yeah, I I saw this quote from Mark Zuckerberg. Like he said recently that wearing these smart glasses allow AI, generative AI, to see what you see and hear what you hear. It's like you know, the sales pitch that you're talking about, right?

14:51 Yeah. I mean, and Zuckerberg has gone so far as to say that people in the future who don't wear these will be at a cognitive disadvantage. Now, this is a a nakedly eugenicist assertion. I think it needs to be called out as such. You know, the idea is that this technology on your face will enhance you in ways that can only you can't really imagine until you until you participate in it.

15:16 The first step toward the uh like desired cyborg-ish kind of future that they want to see. I was struck when you were saying that about AI. Like I want to come back to the broader points, but like I was saying, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was a big pusher of Google Glass back in the day. I believe it was because he was heading up like the Google X division or whatever, and and it was part of that.

15:36 But he did an interview, I believe, back in May where he was talking about how you know there was a like the technology wasn't where it needed to be in 2014 for Google Glass, and that was part of the reason that it failed. I think we could debate that. But he's basically saying that now the technology is there because precisely as you're saying, AI is going to allow you to like do all these things by putting a computer on your face.

16:03 And so, of course, like everybody is going to want this. Like the vision of the future that these guys have seems so divorced from like, I don't know, what most people I feel like would would really desire like from technology, though they can certainly some people will certainly be sold it or or be convinced that it's an appealing thing, but also just like that this is what they think the future should look like.

16:25 It's just so is so impoverished, you know.

16:27 I think it it needs to be noted how divorced these folks are from what life looks like for the everyday person. One of the most profound illustrations of that is how bad they have been at marketing Gen AI in general. I mean, we've all seen the commercials, whether it's from OpenAI or from Meta or from Apple, of these commercials where they don't really resonate with almost anyone.

16:54 I was talking uh last week about the commercial, and it's a little it's about a year old or maybe a little bit more, where there's a a young girl and her father, and the young girl is a fan of a track and field athlete and wants to write her a letter. And so the dad signs into whatever, I don't remember his chat GPT, but he signs into whatever chat bot and helps the daughter generate a letter to her idol.

17:23 You know, I mean, and it's like, come on, it's so very much removed from what I think people, you know, really want or need. The superstar athlete, inasmuch as she would appreciate a letter from a fan who's a seven-year-old girl, doesn't really want it generated by a chatbot. You know, I mean, I'm not a superstar athlete, but like I think that's probably accurate.

17:46 You know, there's a there's another commercial where a guy is he's gonna meet his girlfriend's dad. And the girlfriend has um her dad is some kind of high-powered scientist. He's like a neuroscientist or astrophysicist or something like that. So the guy spends a little bit of time interacting with uh again, with Gemini or ChatGPT or something like that, sort of tutoring himself in that field so that when he shows up to talk to the dad, he can pretend he knows something about it.

18:15 Now, again, this is jerk behavior, right? I mean, if you are gonna meet someone who does who has like an intimidating job or does something really interesting or you know, is in a field that you know nothing about, the sort of more human thing to do is say, hey, that's really interesting. Let's talk about it.

18:33 Like I'd love to know more about it, instead of be a fraud and show up pretending that you know something about it. The demo with the the metaglasses, the m one of the more recent ones, where Zuckerberg was at a table with all these ingredients and he says, Well, well, show me what I can cook with this.

18:48 Maybe there are people who do those things, right? But like I don't think there are a lot of people who would find a lot of use in these specific kinds of cases. I think that there are reasons why these companies want you to stuff a computer on your face, and so what they're left with then is trying to find reasons to make you want to do that.

19:10 What their need is, is for you to have a computer on your face, not for you to be be able to do X, Y, and Z better. It's not to liberate you from your screen. They want you to be a constant source of data, not only a constant source of data in terms of how you are ingesting the world when you wear this technology, but also the extent to which you would be in constant communication with AI.

19:35 And that I think is the impetus behind so many other wearables, whether that's the pendants, the rings, the bracelets, you know, anything that conditions you to be a constant source of data, to always be datified, is sort of the next step. Because, as we talked about with workers, like producing more accurate maps of the world, always knowing what you're up to, being having the ability to constantly be in your ear, directing you in ways that I think that often will benefit, be more of a benefit for the company than for the individual.

20:08 I feel like even hearing you describe that, it brings to mind something I've been thinking about about why these smart glasses are re-emerging in this moment specifically. And it feels like in part there's like the leftover of the metaverse moment and all of the money that Meta in particular put into trying to realize this kind of virtual or augmented reality environment that was, as you say, very much about having you interacting with the screen much more often, collecting much more data about you on a constant basis.

20:42 The idea being that you were going to spend a lot more of your time in this metaverse with this headset on your face rather than out in the world, so to speak. And I think it's clear that Mark Zuckerberg always had the ambition to do something like a smart glasses, and the tech just wasn't there a few years ago to try to promote the type of thing that he's doing right now.

21:02 And then, of course, the generative AI moment that followed that layers on another opportunity where you can say, okay, we can stick this on your face. You know, the tech has advanced to the degree that we can like project a screen onto the glasses and maybe like animate some things in your field of vision and like use computer vision and stuff to detect what is in front of you.

21:23 But then on the other hand, it's like now we're layering in this other big bet that we're making to try to add some like more appealing features and the kind of you know voice response system that wouldn't have worked nearly as well a few years ago as well. So I don't know, to me it feels like a real intersection of those two, of those two moments and trying to push it forward in this way to try to find something tangible from both of those big experiments, I guess.

21:49 I think one of the the things that's interesting, you know, interesting, pejorative, the model has changed for what these companies are trying to do and what they they say they're trying to do. And so what I mean by By that is for a long period of time, the sort of deal, and some and this was often openly articulated by the companies.

22:07 The deal was that you would get free services in exchange for some surveillance. Right? Google's free. You know, Facebook's free, right? These are all in quotation marks. These systems and technologies and platforms are free, and the way you pay for them is in some modest form of surveillance. Okay. Now, that deal was always a lie, right?

22:28 I mean, so the deal is a lie because there was not moderate surveillance. There it was intense surveillance in ways that most people I think were not aware of. You know, we find that there's Facebook pixels in the site where you go in and to make an appointment with your doctor. We find that, you know, Google's driving past your house, right?

22:50 You know, on and on and on. We could spend the entire length of the podcast talking about these abuses, and these were part of the deal, you know, that these companies rarely mentioned. The deal has sort of changed. And now what these companies are saying is not that you pay for the thing you want with a little bit of surveillance.

23:09 They're trying to now convince us that surveillance is the thing we actually want. You know, the good things that you'll get will only come, you know, through like intense surveillance, through like having this thing on your face all the time, through having this thing that constantly soaks up not only kind of what you see, but also what you hear, and you know, further, kind of your biometrics, right?

23:34 Like your tone of voice, your heart rate, you know, your blood pressure, you know, whatever it is, that surveillance then becomes like the thing. The way I've been thinking about it is it's like a a third wave of of algorithms. That again, part of how they used to talk about these systems is that they were built to connect you.

23:54 And you know, I'll say specifically with Facebook, but we can also think about this with other platforms, not only through Meta, but you know, things like Spotify, things like Google, like all these things. That what they did was to, you know, connect you. That the idea with Facebook was we can let you know what your friends are up to.

24:12 You know, Zuckerberg's got that famous line. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he was quoted as saying, like a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more important to you than people dying in Africa. Like this is early Zuckerberg, okay? Early Facebook.

24:28 I hadn't heard that one, but sounds about right. Yeah.

24:32 Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's early Facebook, right? We'll we connect. Now the second wave is curate, that algorithms do all these fabulous things for you. That the finer tuned the algorithm is, the better it will be connecting you with things that you want, even when you didn't know you wanted them. This is like Facebook, but this is also Spotify.

24:54 This is also TikTok. I think the third wave, and why they're a lot less coy about the surveillance aspect, is you know, the third C. I call it like the command phase, right? That the idea is now that you will be able to optimize your life if you just listen to the to AI, right? If you give yourself over to the algorithm.

25:15 And the only way for you to do that, you know, in terms of what the company needs, is for the company to have all the information on you, right? Whether that's agentic AI, you know, again, and quotation marks, whether that's agentic AI, or whether that's a device that, you know, sort of inhales and captures everything you do.

25:34 It sort of gets rid of the messiness of sort of trying to predict what you'll do and gets more into like trying to like train you to do a certain thing. And I know this sounds like a little bit sort of conspiratorial and things like that, but but look at what they say. Look at how they talk about it.

25:50 They've been far more explicit. And again, I I think Zuckerberg is sort of the worst the or the most obvious person. I think Altman does this a lot. Any AI booster who works or or runs these companies or does extreme promotions of AI. The idea is that with enough information, the AI can can help you optimize your life.

26:13 What that necessitates is you do what the AI says you do. You know, you watch the shows that it tells you to watch, right? You go to bed when it says go to bed. The interesting thing too, right, is like I thought for a long time nobody wanted this. I think there are people who want this. This brings me no joy to say.

26:29 I think there are people who are happily would cede their lives to the machine, make fewer decisions if it made life easier.

26:36 It's like, you know, the people who prefer like order, even if it comes with the curtailment of freedoms, right? But I don't think what you're laying out is conspiratorial at all. Like I think it's a reflection of what we're seeing these executives say. And and obviously what these companies are very much trying to do and the use cases that they're promoting for these tools, right?

27:00 And as you're saying, like, yeah, we can talk about smart glasses, but smart glasses seem just intimately connected to the generative AI moment in such a way that they can't really be disentwined, right? Because the whole idea of why you would put the computer on your face is so that you can interact with the AI bot, the AI agent, the chat bot, whatever.

27:20 And it's like we saw those earlier attempts to push out, you remember those little little like squares basically that a few companies released that like kind of go on your lapel or whatnot, and they were like kind of ridiculed. They were like, this is stupid, you know, and they kind of fell apart. But it does really feel that the companies are making a big push to move into that space and to justify it even more.

27:42 And it's like the wearables already started to accustom us to it. You know, you were talking about the notion that surveillance ultimately becomes the product, and it feels like Apple has been moving in that way for quite some time, right? It doesn't have the smart glasses, but through the Apple Watch, and now the headphones are getting it.

27:59 Remember when they released the Apple Watch initially and it was like kind of positioned as like a fashion product, right? You know, they had this big announcement with like the fashion magazines and all this kind of stuff because that's what Johnny Ive wanted. And once they found like the real use case, it was like, oh, okay, this is like fitness and health, right?

28:14 This is tracking all these things. And you see when they do the keynotes now, there are these big like videos that come before the Apple Watch announcements about how many people whose lives have maybe been saved because they were wearing an Apple Watch and all this kind of stuff, right? Like it's it's explicit in the pitch.

28:30 And now it's like they're just taking the kind of foundation that they've already built here and like taking it to a whole other level.

28:37 Yeah. You know, I think, I mean, there's a bunch of interesting things in what you said. I mean, one of the points I wanted to bring up is like tech pros in one sort or another have been fantasizing about this for a long time. You know, I was just reading about Woody Bledsoe, who was one of the early researchers into facial recognition.

28:53 And one of the things he he wrote about was the idea that he would have a pair of glasses, you know, with a microphone, you know, equipped with facial recognition, so that when he encountered people on the street, it could tell him who the person was, right? It could identify his friends, for instance, right?

29:12 But also, yeah, I think that that move, the suggestion that these devices are also going to be health devices, I think is uh interesting and rather dire turn as well. Because of the moment we're living in, RFK Jr. or RFK, not I think this summer, you know, said, like, I think that every American, you know, in his in his future, he believes that every American should be equipped with a wearable.

29:39 Yeah, you shouldn't have vaccines, but you can have this like device on you all the time. Okay.

29:44unknown Right.

29:45 Yeah, this is a terrible future, right? I don't think this is a good idea, you know, but the companies are very closely aligned with this with this mission. And to blur the line between what is, you know, a luxury device, a fitness device, and a health device. I think a thing that turns health into a set of individual choices, you know, directly serves again like a eugenicist and and fascist directive.

30:11 When you're talking about like even that vision of using the glasses to be able to identify someone who's like going up to speak with you, a few things come to mind there initially. First is like the scene in the film The Devil Wears Prada, you know, where Meryl Streep's character is like basically the Anna Windwor, the editor in chief of the fashion magazine.

30:31 And she's at this like, you know, kind of gala sort of thing where she has to greet all these people. And her two assistants are basically trained on this like big book of people, so that if someone starts to approach her and she doesn't know who it is, she can like kind of lean back and they can say the name into her ear and and who it is, you know, and it's like it's like okay, automating the like personal assistant role in in that to like help the kind of wealthy person know what's going on.

30:56 But then also like the more like tangible piece is like I believe it was 404 Media reported on this experiment by these Harvard students where they tried out like the meta smart glasses and and an application or were like able to dox anybody they wanted, like in real time, like figure out their information based on facial recognition, just like out in the streets.

31:15 And it's like, so these tools like already kind of have that capability, and it's not just like, oh, I want to see who this person is when I greet them. It's like now I can figure out anybody out there in public and like get their information just by like scanning their face with my glasses, and like that's a scary step that these companies certainly don't want us to be thinking about, right?

31:36 Yeah, it's a stalker's fantasy that is unfortunately about to become our reality. I mean, the the two Harvard students you mentioned, I mean, they had a very clunky version that they were able to put together. And since Meta's been playing with AR and VR, people have approached them and and to and asked whether they put facial recognition into their devices.

31:59 They had been very coy about this, and they did what these companies do a lot of times, which is to say, well, you know, we'll need to sort of figure out how society thinks about that, right? I mean, that's never what they really do. They wait for a moment where it is more palatable or seems that they'll face this backlash, and then they do what they had planned to do probably all along.

32:24 Now, as far as I know, the current versions do not have facial recognition in them, but I feel like I've seen some reports that this is a thing that is is going to be integrated into the glasses sooner rather than later. And again, like this is like a profoundly antisocial application. Like, I don't think facial recognition should exist.

32:47 Like, I'll be super honest about that. But I I think that these things that lower the barrier for toxic behavior. For instance, when someone approached I I can't remember the name of the Facebook or meta-executive who said this, but I can I can point you to the article where they said it. Someone approached them and asked them about the two Harvard students who made the classes.

33:09 And what this uh meta-exec said was, well, you could do that with a phone, right? Now it's true you could do that with a phone, but I I think what this fails to sort of reckon with is each iteration of these things, it sort of lowers the barrier for toxic behavior. And so you could walk around with your phone out, scanning people's faces and dox them.

33:34 But to wear your phone on your face and do that with everyone, it's like a little easier. And then, you know, some people point to the sort of light that supposedly shines when you're recording with metaglasses and things like that. I don't think that's sufficient. And I don't know if they work or not, but several outlets have reported that people are selling online stickers that occlude the light but allow the camera to still work.

34:01 And whatever sort of positive use cases you might imagine. Okay, maybe you don't you forget people's names and you would like a thing that reminds you of who you're talking to. That's possible. But I don't think that that outweighs all the sort of negative things that will be done with this, right? Rather, that's like doxing people at protest, stalking people, producing or in live streaming hateful content, you know, or atrocities, it's already been done.

34:31 You know, used by a fascistic government to more easily produce and stream content, it's already been done. I think that when you lower the barrier for these activities, which is what these companies are doing, it makes society worse. That some of these things are possible now, it's slightly more difficult to do them.

34:48 And I think the more difficult it is to do toxic and antisocial things, the better.

34:53 I wonder as well, like how you're thinking about how they're selling this to people, right? You know, you said that there are obviously going to be people who are, you know, who who want to have their lives kind of controlled and managed by generative AI. But when I think about, say, the smart glasses, you know, even people I know who are generally like, I would never wear a pair of smart glasses, like this is stupid.

35:14 You know, when Google and Meta showed off their tools to basically like do the live translation feature, they were like, yeah, but that would be kind of convenient, right? Now, you know, whether it works in practice, how they were presenting it in like a demo, I'm sure maybe not as as kind of seamless, but I wonder how how you make of that and like how they effectively try to like position these potential benefits to try to get people on board.

35:41 Yeah. One of the things I I I like to always point out to people is that we could have these things in different ways. That there are very conscious design decisions that go into these things. For instance, live translation. Could it G earbuds? Sure it could. But that's like a different kind of way that then meta is ingesting everything you do.

36:05 I believe Apple showed off earbuds with like a similar feature more recently, I think.

36:09 Yeah, I mean, but they're also putting they plan to put cameras in their earbuds.

36:13 Right. Oh my god.

36:15 Right. But the other thing is it cannot be removed from the fact that these are some of the most extractive and oppressive companies to ever exist. And so it can't be removed if you look at what might be the positive use cases or the benefits of these things, it can't be removed from the current situation in the history of these companies.

36:36 For instance, I mean, Facebook is a company that had information that the content they were producing was negatively affecting girls and women's body image. Their own research told them that. And they kept doing it. You know, more recently, they developed chatbots that were able to have sexy talk with minors, right?

36:58 They they had a grooming chatbot that they only backed down on after journalists and researchers pointed it out. There's some of the worst companies to ever exist that routinely do things to harm their users if it benefits the company, if it keeps people on the platform, if it maintains people's dependence on the platform, that their metrics are more important than our well-being, people's health, the social fabric, like any of those things.

37:28 Like they demonstrated this over and over and over and over again. And so, yeah, would it be cool to have some of these functions? Yeah, like I can admit that. Right now, it can't be removed from a company or set of companies that have openly aligned themselves with authoritarianism and have a terrible track record in terms of the ways that they privilege the bottom line and the dependence on the platform over people's social and mental and physical well-being.

38:00 Bringing up the broader social context, I wanted to get to that as well, right? Because I feel like there's a pretty common meme that that spreads online that like generative AI, you know, meme argument, whatever you want to say, that generative AI is like basically the aesthetic of fascism at the moment.

38:16 You know, you see how, say, the Trump administration and you know these really right-wing groups kind of use generative AI in order to create a particular form of media that justifies and amplifies the politics that they are spreading, right? You know, we see in particular in the United States, but other countries as well, where this is playing out.

38:37 And, you know, when we talk about smart glasses and the kind of surveillance and the potential deployments of these technologies, I wonder how you think about that in relation to the kind of fascist political moment that we that we find ourselves in.

38:51 Yeah, I mean, I I think again, like I'd look no further than the report from 404 where uh CBP was wearing a pair of meta-ray bands. And I I think the other thing to think about too is the Andorrill and Meta partnership to produce you know some form of VR, AR goggles for the military. I think it's understated the degree to which all of these companies that were started out as some sort of social media platform or something like that, are now also weapons dealers in some form or another.

39:25 They're arms dealers in some form or another, they're government contractors in ways that certainly they didn't start out to be, right? But whether they're providing hardware or infrastructure, all of these companies now are government contractors and arms dealers. I don't think that these things are sort of incidental, and again, I don't I don't think it can be removed from the larger context.

39:47 I mean, I think a lot always about who was lined up at the inauguration, who was like in the front row, you know, and that was Zuckerberg, and that was the head of Google and the head of Microsoft. That was a a very clear indication of their their priorities and their values. And I I think what's also important, you know, when we're talking about Gen AI is that I think uh Grok is the best illustration of this.

40:16 We can think about sort of Trump's edict against woke AI and things like that. But I I think another thing I think is understated is the degree to which part of the function of Gen AI is to have us acclimated to chatbots as a source of truth. Now, Grag being the best example because we've seen countless times where when it produced answers that didn't agree with Musk's ideology, that there was some tinkering with it.

40:46 And what that resulted in is kind of Mecha Hitler and and things like that. I think that the other companies are up to things that are very similar. You know, we've seen this with Google, for instance, when they admitted in the the Monopoly trial that their primary search, right, the search that we've become accustomed to had been degraded because they're trying to switch people over to AI, to the AI summaries, the Gemini summaries and things like that.

41:12 And they didn't really care that their primary search had been degraded. One because you know it meant people would spend more time on Google, but also that the hope was that people would then come to see Gemini as a source for truth. Again, I think this is really dangerous.

41:28 Dude, it's so grim to hear you describe that.

41:31 Yeah. Because they are clearly aligned with authoritarian forces, and they're also the companies that are saying use our technology to provide you with the truth. And I don't think those things could be separated from one another.

41:47 Definitely. And that there was that report the other day as well that they were suppressing searches about Trump and some kind of health condition, I guess, that people have been talking about and potentially having. And there was another report that Apple had also kind of, after Trump was re-elected, tinkered with its AI tools to change the type of responses it would generate about Trump or or or something like that, you know, like kind of giving in to, you know, the without explicitly being demanded of them, but making sure that they wouldn't kind of create something that would piss off Trump and his his followers, right?

42:19 Yeah. And these are things, I mean, they're in learning management systems, they're in schools. They are encouraging us to have it as a best friend, as a therapist, as a life coach. They're using it to answer 911 calls, right? I mean, all kinds of things, right? And the implications for that are frankly awful.

42:40 You know, and so the idea that we would have devices that are constantly dripping poison into our ear, I don't think that that's like a net positive for society.

42:50 Absolutely not. In the same way social media isn't, if it if it ever was, you know. You say dripping poison in your ear, but it's like, where was I? I was at a I was at like a journalism conference the other day, and somebody said that social media, like a platform like Facebook, is almost like if the water pipe coming into your home was bringing your drinking water and your sewage like in the same pipe, right?

43:09 It's like it all just gets full of sewage, you know? It's not, it's not drinkable, it's gross. It's terrible. Like what they have created and what we now have to deal with. And I think what you're saying about kind of assessing the drawbacks and and the risks alongside the things that they're trying to sell us that might be good is like a really important way to look at it because that's how I tend to look at these things more and more is like, okay, there might be some benefits here, but does that outweigh the real drawbacks that come with it?

43:35 You know, the ways that it's causing social harm in the way that you're saying. And you know, with a lot of these things, I'm less and less convinced.

43:41 Yeah. And I think um another thing I hadn't mentioned, you know, a couple months back, Zuckerberg talked about, you know, what he called the male loneliness crisis, and that chatbots and genai are part of his solution to that. And I think, again, knowing what we know about these companies. Knowing what we know about the extent to which they will visit harm upon people if it means people keep using their product.

44:08 The idea that these tools could be your friends or your confidants, I think is really dangerous. And I think that it can't be overstated the extent to which part of why these tools exist is to isolate us, to insert these companies in between us and all the relationships that we have. That's why they say, well, you can use it on dating sites, you know, you can you can talk to it about your problems, you know, things like that.

44:38 But it, you know, going back to some of the other wearables, you know, for as long as people have existed, you know, mostly when they wake up in the morning, they know if they have slept well or not, for instance. They didn't need a device to tell them that. These devices, particularly with Gen AI, they exist to foster a sense of distrust in yourself in terms of you know what you think and how you feel.

45:03 When I go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow, uh, you know, God willing, like that, I will have some sense of whether or not I slept well, and I'll know, for instance, well, part of it is probably that I stayed up late watching or playing video games, or you know, I ate something I shouldn't have eaten late at night, you know, or I'm stressed about something.

45:24 And to adjust my myself accordingly or my my habits accordingly. That most of the time we know these things. And so offloading that to a device, I think, gives the company a kind of power that we don't want to seed, you know. I mean, we've already seen, for instance, um, the extent to which using Gen AI kind of erodes people's ability for critical thinking.

45:48 We've seen how it lessens doctors, for instance, ability to diagnose. We've seen lots of examples like this, and I think that the further reliance on these things makes it possible that those things will be exacerbated.

46:04 It's not really on smart glasses, but since we've kind of expanded the conversation a bit, I have to ask you about Sora 2, the video generator that OpenAI released recently, that has, of course, taken the internet and the social media and the discourse by storm, but you know, is also obviously clearly just within the first few days showing how it can be used in really negative and harmful ways.

46:29 So when you see a product like that emerge onto the scene, what are you thinking?

46:34 Yeah, I mean, for people who don't know who I am or follow me on Blue Sky, I mean, I refer to OpenAI as a social arsonist. Again, I'll be honest. Like, I am not the audience or market for these tools. But I cannot name you a socially positive use of these things. And if you can name them, does it outweigh the abuses, right?

46:56 And it's it's actually not fair to call them abuses because this is actually to me why they exist. The deep fakes, the ability to create degrading and offensive, misogynistic, transphobic, racist imagery on demand at scale. You know, I go back a lot of times to Rob Horning's piece where he talks about Gen AI and he says, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, I should know the exact quote because I've used it so many times, but I'm paraphrasing, and he says, the purpose of Gen AI is to force someone to see the world in the way that you desire.

47:35 That it exists to promote and proliferate degrading and antisocial imagery, and any other use case is incidental. What is the positive use case that outweighs a technology that lowers the barrier to producing like deep fakes and all other kinds of horrendous material on demand at scale? Like there is not one.

48:01 You know, I'm pretty unequivocal about that. And then for Altman to come out, you know, a couple days later and say, well, we didn't know that people were gonna use it in this way, or we didn't know that companies wouldn't want their IEP used in this fashion. Uh I mean, I think they knew that people would make images of of SpongeBob and Patrick cooking meth, and that the people who own own that IEP probably would not be happy with that.

48:28 But if you you sort of drill down and you you think like, well, what is this good for? What is the the positive use case on the one hand that makes all these other use cases acceptable? And you know, for my taste, there is none.

48:43 I uh you know, I think these technologies should be like wiped off the face of the earth. I don't see the positive use case at all, especially where, like you're saying, if you can think of a positive use case, it's like destroying like the creative work that we feel is so intrinsically human and like part of our culture, and now handing that over to a machine, and it's like, oh, okay, great.

49:05 Like that saying that, like, I thought the robots were gonna like do the dirty work, do the chores, clean up after me, whatever. And now it's like they're taking the like fulfilling part of being a human and making me do the dredgery, you know? Like it's a mess.

49:18 Yeah. Although I did see there are companies now that claim if you let them train their robots on you folding clothes, for instance, they're trying to accumulate a critical mass of training data that will allow robots to fold clothes and do laundry and things like that. And part of the pitch is that you need to wear meta glasses while you're doing these things.

49:40 I remain unconvinced. I mean, like, human beings still do all of our sewing. So, like, I'll believe it when I see it.

49:47 Absolutely. I'm not expecting the Tesla bot to be in my house anytime soon doing my chores. Uh it's always great to talk to you and to dig into all this. I have I have one more question for you. Going back to what we were talking about in the very beginning, right? You know, we were talking about the resistance to Google Glass, how that got defeated.

50:05 You were saying this time is is quite different, right? And I think that you have laid out for us through this conversation why that is. Do you see opportunities to push back against this future to try to defeat it? And where do you see hope for that?

50:16 Yeah, I mean, you know, I go back to something Emily Bender said, you know, again, I don't have the quote in front of me, but like uh I'll do my best to approximate it. When she was talking about Gen AI, and she said that she thought about it like plastic, that in our daily lives at this moment, it's very difficult to avoid plastic, but that when we have the opportunity to avoid it and to reject it, we should.

50:41 And that it's much earlier in the life cycle of Gen AI than it is with plastic, right? That perhaps if we had done more to reject it as we started to realize the harms, we would be in a different spot. Part of why I started started the whole luxury surveillance project is I think that there are a segment of people who think that they are immune from the harms of these technologies.

51:08 When I talked about the parallels between an ankle monitor and Apple Watch or Fitbit, the reason I came up with that is because there were so many people who embrace these things not understanding, and I don't mean that to be patronizing, right? But not considering even the possibility that in some way or another, not only would that surveillance harm them, but that the embrace of these things in many ways makes society worse.

51:36 That everyone having a ring doorbell now means that we have much more closer to you know a Panopticon than we would be. And again, if you need to have surveillance cameras, there's ways to do that that doesn't feed it to Amazon and doesn't feed it to a fusion center that's in the downtown of of where you live.

51:56 So part of the reason I I came up with that formulation of luxury surveillance is to try to tease out ways that these systems are not good overall. That even if you think you're immune from the um harms of these things, most likely you're not. I mean, there's a a tiny, tiny segment of the population who will never experience those harms.

52:19 But also that that is not whether or not something harms you is not really a good metric for whether or not you should do it. That the embrace of these things makes society worse. That is how I would encourage people to think about it. That whether or not individually you may gain some benefit from from these things, I recognize that some people think they do.

52:41 Often that benefit's overstated, right? Like, you know, does an Apple Watch make the average person um like more fit? Like the answer is no. There's been a lot of research on it. I mean, like it's it's a little bit more qualified than just no, but like mostly the answer is no, right? You know, just because people think that they accrue some benefit, that's not a good metric for whether or not we should adopt these things.

53:02 And so what resistance looks like is turning them down when we can, understanding what the sort of trade-offs are are, what the deal is now. Is that deal the one that's articulated by the companies, or is it much deeper? But also, we've come to think of like social shaming as a bad thing. But I think when people display profoundly harmful and antisocial behavior, like one of the mechanisms that I think societies have developed is to shame those people and ostracize them.

53:34 I don't know people who have Alexas and ring doorbells. Now, you know, there's some self-selection in that, but also like the people I know who would say something like, Well, wouldn't it be great if I could do this, right? Like, I have a talk with them, right? Like, you know, I think that if we want a society that's less beholden to these things and less accepting, that some of that needs to come back.

54:00 When someone walked into a bar with Google Glass, sometimes the bartender would just say, get out. Moving away from that, I think, has been detrimental to society.

54:10 Totally. 100% agree. Let's bring back the shaming of these people. I I loved seeing recently the graffiti on all of the ads for the friend AI wearable necklace or whatever it is that this company was trying to sell. And like, people are just not having it, you know, and that's a good thing. So, like I was saying, it's always great to have you on the show.

54:32 You can lay out the issues with these things so well, you know, make it so clear and concrete. I always enjoy hearing your perspective. Thank you so much for taking the time.

54:41 Oh, it's always wonderful to be here, and I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure.

54:47 Chris Gilliard is a co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and is working on a book called Luxury Surveillance. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

55:04 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.