Cooking with glasses

I've been thinking the new Meta Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses. Not because they failed onstage, which they absolutely did. Or that shortly after they received rave reviews from Victoria Song at The Verge and MKBHD, two of the most influential tech reviewers. My impression is that the hardware has improved but the software is pretty bad.

Mostly I keep thinking about the cooking demo. Yeah, it bombed. But what if it worked? What if Meta releases the third iteration of this hardware next year and it worked? This post is just questions.

The demos were deeply weird: both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Mancuso (the celebrity chef) had their AR glasses in a particular demo mode that broadcasted the audio they were hearing and the video they were seeing to the audience and to the live feed of the event.

Of course they need to square the circle of AR glasses being 'invisible technology,' but showing people what it does. According to MKBHD's review, one of the major breakthroughs of the new edition is that you can't see when other people are looking at the glasses built-in display.

I should credit Song for mentioning the privacy issues of the glasses in her review for The Verge. MKBHD briefly talks about his concern that people will use the glasses to be even more distracted during face-to-face interactions. It's not like everyone's totally ignoring the implications.

But the implications. Like for example: I don't know, sometimes I'm cooking for my partner. Do they hear a one-sided conversation between me and the "Live AI" about what to do first, how to combine the ingredients? Without the staged demo's video-casting, this would have been the demo: a celebrity chef talking to himself like a lunatic, asking how to start.

Or what if we're cooking together – do we both have the glasses, and maybe the Live AI responds to… both of us? Do we hear each other's audio, or is it a mystery what the AI is telling the sous-chef? Does it broadcast to a bluetooth speaker maybe?

Maybe the glasses are able to do joint attention and know who else is in your personal space and share with them in a permissioned way? Does this lock everyone into a specific brand of the glasses or is there some open protocol? It's been a long, long time since I've seen a new open protocol.

Marques's video shows an impressively invisible display to others, but surely there's some reflection on people's retinas: could you scan that and read people's screens off of their eyeballs?

I hate to preempt critiques but the obvious counterpoint is that "the glasses will be good for people with accessibility needs." Maybe the AI is unnecessary for cooking, and a lot of its applications will be creepy or fascist, but being able to translate or caption text in real-time will be really useful to people with hearing issues.

I think that's true! In the same way as crypto was useful for human rights and commerce in countries with unreliable exchanges and banks - a point most forcefully spoken by Alex Gladstein. I'm not one to do the ethical arithmetic on the benefits of crypto in those situations versus the roughly $79 billion worth of scams that it has generated or its impact on climate change. My outsider view is that there are more people and more volume of crypto involved in the speculative & scam sector than in the human-rights sector, but I'm willing to be wrong.

I've always been intrigued by, but not sold on, Dynamicland and its New York cousin, folk.computer. But every AR demo I see sells me on that paradigm more. For all of the kookiness of the Dynamicland paradigm, it seems designed for a social, playful world. Nothing about the technology guarantees that outcome, but it definitely suggests it. Likewise, the AR glasses might usher in a new age of isolation and surveillance, but that isn't guaranteed - that just seems like a likely outcome.

I'm searching for a vision of the AR future, just like I want to read about what really happens with AI proliferation, or what I wished crypto advocates would have written. I want people who believe in this tech to write about how it'll change their lives and the lives of others, and what really can be done about the risks.