With how society has reacted to the meta glasses, it has me wondering about optical implants. They’re going to be here eventually, and presumably will have cameras in them out of necessity. I’m sure there will be a whole thing about getting ones that aren’t back doored by a corp, but we are also talking about curing blindness. This isn’t something everyone will skip on due to a fear of surveillance, simply because blindness can be so difficult to live with.
Are we careening towards a deus ex scenario where the majority of humanity villifies and ostracizes anyone with augments? I always expected that to a certain degree, religious folks especially being what they are, but the reaction to smart glasses has me concerned that the discrimination against people with optical implants might be way more extreme than I expected, from groups of people I would have previously considered level headed when it comes to technological advancements.
Anyway, I was just curious to hear from others what their thoughts might be on the subject. Do those of you that despise smart glasses think you’ll have the same moral issues with optical implants? What could be done to avoid the issues you have with the glasses when it comes to implants, if anything? Do you intend to discriminate against people with augments if you live long enough to see them in widespread use?
The current obcession is tech but we should remember ourselves that bio-tech is a thing and small achievements in it have profound impacts.
Medication to regrow teeth has been developed. Cultured tissues have been created. At some point, we may very well develop the techniques and technology to either create organs in vitro or medication capable of regrowing organs.
Conventional nuts and bolts or wires and chips tech will be rendered useless.
Pervert-I-plants
Sad to say I would not trust anyone who is constantly pointing a secret corpo camera at me. Even if its curing their blindness
There aren’t going to be a whole lot of people who are going to fuck with their eyesight if they don’t have a severe eyesight handycap, which isn’t as common as Meta wants smart glasses to be.
Also, every hearing aid is a microphone, yet I’ve never heard of a case where information from hearing aids was being misused. Almost like there’s a big divide between aids for disabilities and surveillance tech.
The hearing aid comparison is a great point.
Not really. Hearing aids aren’t uploading everything they hear to the cloud.
People are seen by others constantly, it’s knowing that someone could save that video and later share it online that creeps people out.
is it possible that these glasses are “villified” because they’re made by an actual villain? meta does not believe people deserve privacy, and their tech is explicitly trying to mine data from people for manipulative uses in advertising, creative farming, and media manipulation.
also, optical implants may not necessarily need a “camera” to work. degenerative and genetic vision disorders are not a monolith, and oftentimes it’s about transmission of the image to the brain, not the eye itself.
So I work a secure unit where we take people’s devices for the privacy of all patients. We had to take a patient’s prescription glasses that they like, use to not fall down while walking, because they were smart glasses with audio / video recording functionality. This is just a whole extra level of #NewFearUnlocked. I cannot imagine the administrative clusterfuck this would cause.
It’ll be way, way worse than what you’re thinking because of prevention mechanisms for corporate espionage, and just regular old espionage for that matter. The technology to remotely shutdown/control cars that everyone agrees exists today, and is a problem today? It’s coming to eyes in the future. You won’t be allowed to work for company X unless they get the keys to control the recording function on your eyes, because otherwise you could walk off with their recipes or whatever. It’s even a completely understandable “ask,” but as with the cars, TVs, cell phones, smart watches, etc, there’s no user/owner level control over restrictions. You can’t unplug your eyes the way you can a car cell antenna.
It’s a good time to talk about it since the technology isn’t here yet, because the first implementations of it will be desperate volunteers who’ll sign up for anything to get sight, and it’ll be really hard to argue to someone who had some irreversable, company proprietary device installed on the end of their optic nerve the ins and outs of why the signed away the rights to know if their eyes are recording them and transmitting without their knowledge.
This has also occurred to me but I’m not at exactly the point in my life where this is the most relevant part of the debate compared to the effect that directly impacts my primary specialty.
You can source new prescription glasses for someone to replace the AV glasses; it might take a bit, but it can be done. The infrastructure necessary to securely disable a set of features in any person’s eyes who could plausibly need to be in an environment like you’re describing means they’ll all be designed/built that way.
It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.
—Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson had it be ostracized.
I should really read that one.
