Comment by cmdshiftf4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmdshiftf4 | Hacker News Reader

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>"at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology."

Constant video surveillance, direct-to-eyes on-glass advertising, targeted advertising beamed on every approved spot, interests profiling via retina movements/focus and God knows what else will undoubtedly come about if AR glasses become "cool" and ubiquitous like mobile phones.

Maybe we'll be able to see one another's social points, as earned on the Facebook Ubiquity Platform for All Things Interaction, when gazing upon one another? Maybe we'll be able to haze filter out those naughties who haven't earned enough, or have had points taken away for naughty behaviour like posting against the "community guidelines"?

Maybe we'll be able to use image recognition + the voter records to put an angel or devil next to the people we agree/disagree with politically? How novel would that be? And talk about a time saver! Who wants to even acknowledge those who don't vote in line with our party!?

But seriously though, what options do those of us have to not be part of this dystopian fucking nightmare that the tech elite have in store for us? Save up and try to buy a hut near their fallout shelters in NZ under the hopes that they won't shit where they hide?

Huh, I just want my heads up life display because...why not? Maybe I won’t trust Facebook to give it to me, but if the tech becomes good enough, I’m definitely going to embrace it.

Is it really a dystopian future? We’ve adjusted to the telegraph, camera, telephone, radio, TV, cell phone, smart phone and...why are AR glasses going to be the tech to bring society down?

Huh, I just want my heads up life display because...why not?

Assuming that your heads-up live display contains a public facing camera here's: Why not!

I don't like sitting in a bar (or a strip club, or in any other semi-public, or even public dodgy or non-dodgy place) and you hang there with your heads-up live display recording my image.

I don't like the fact that it's uploaded to some tech behemoth' server for further analysis (or even if not - by you later to your personal social media page, controlled by such a company).

I don't like an army of people like you recording every little nuance of my life, which then gets abused to feed even more AI algorithms by companies whom's major raison d'être is to violate all our privacy and infringing on my personal rights without permission or consent.

And no! Locking myself permanently into a room is really not a solution conductive to me or for us as a society.

Remember Google glass and why it failed? Not because the tech couldn't be useful. But it failed thanks to a company, which didn't give a shit about the impact of such tech and an army of glassholes (here's a nice example[1]) who cared even less.

I think the answer to your "why not" and to your personal gratification is that the price for us as a society is far too expensive.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+scoble+glass+hole

Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.

Google Glass wasn’t ready, the tech isn’t ready yet. People stopped using it because it wasn’t useful. The tech will be useful someday, however.

Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits. It didn’t work out well for them in the end.

>Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits

They actually didn't. They just broke them because they (rightly) saw that as an effective means of raising the price of their artisanship.

The luddites are more akin to the Paris Uber strikers - who also weren't anti technology.

the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

OK, good, you understand the origin of the problem. Modern technology has co-opted ordinary people to act as spies for big, powerful data processing organisations, in the process seriously undermining our privacy.

Now, how do we solve it?

Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they? Most video just gets deleted unless some event happened, they don’t even archive it.

I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.

Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they?

How can you ever be sure of that, though?

Devices get hacked.

The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.

Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.

These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.

I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.

There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.

Let's say I'm grocery shopping or whatever and there's 3 people recording for whatever reason. Now I'm on their video, on Facebook, very likely to be tagged.

No thank you.

If they can do that, I am free to fly a drone above their head.

CCTVs exist for the business and to protect the business, and used to actually be closed-circuit. Now that a lot of them are becoming "cloud", they will create a lot of the same problems.

The difference with voluntary mass surveillance in combination with AI and social credit is that it incentivizes people to rat on each other to the government or Facebook.

Sigh! Where to start? OK, let me give it a shot.

Luddites complained about the automated loom as well

Now that's a really bad case of whataboutism. I'm not complaining about technological advance. I'm complaining about tech, which is a massive invasion of privacy. Have you ever been lying on a beach and some asshole lets his drone flying around? I don't know about you, but I really don't fancy to be half naked on some cretin's social media feed without my consent (which, needless to say I didn't give and would never ever provide).

Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded.

I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that if such an establishment uploads the feed to the internet they'll go out of business mighty fast. In addition I don't have cops hanging around semi private places constantly recording what's going on in such places.

Those establishments may have a justified use, namely security, for such tech. You don't.

almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video

That was one of the more stupid arguments used by glassholes. When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.

people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass

Actually they are very much. There were umpteen stories about glassholes using their gizmos even in places that explicitly banned their use. They then had the nerve to complain publicly about "ludites" that deemed this unacceptable.

Here's a search for you:

"privacy abuse google glass"

It yields 53’900’000 results. If just one procent of one procent involve actual stories of real privacy violations that's a massive invasion of societal privacy for ones own gratification. And that's exactly what's completely unacceptable.

You're free to believe in your techno utopia and that it only leads to progess and betterment of humanity.

I think you're wrong and believe my arguments to be sound as proven by the last 20 years and the rise of those tech behemoths and their constantly shitty behavior.

Calling me a ludite and using tech, which truly benefited humanity to make your argument makes you, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest.

And that's where I'll close my argument, since it's pretty obvious that we'll never agree.

> When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.

Not necessarily obvious. You most likely can't tell if someone is just holding his phone in his hands, or is recording you. There are apps that don't show a preview or any other clues on screen, so you won't know even if you get to see their screen.

We have had CCTVs around for the last 30 years, where are the massive privacy violations that you guys predicted 30 years ago?

Very very few people had google glass to begin with, the glass hole term was invented and perpetuated by a bunch of conspiracy theorists, enough to get 3.9 million hits on google (for < 1000 units?), it provides no evidence of anything.

Tech Luddism is as old as technology itself. It isn’t surprising that you don’t want this, that you don’t want other people to have this, we’ve gone down this road before and we will go down it again.

Tech Luddism has nothing to do with these arguments. I do not want tech that someone else controls, because it benefits 'them', not me. I want tech that I can control. See, e.g., Free Software Foundation and Purism.

CCTV footage wasn’t uploaded for everyone to see and comment on. It is usually closed to owners of them, and authorities who have reason to use it for investigation of a crime.

Using the “conspiracy theorist” argument is a typical way of trying to put a negative label on a group of people you disagree with these days. 3.9 million results doesn’t sound like a group of 10 mentally unsound people spewing a BS conspiracy. It provides evidence that a large portion of people don’t agree with the tech.

>Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

>A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.

The first two Cs in CCTV don't stand for instantly uploading everything to a 3rd party for analysis.

CCTV is fundamentally different than the "instantly send the data to a central server" model that currently dominates because CCTV is not reviewed except when it needs to be.

> instantly send the data to a central server

and in addition... share it on social media. Benign examples being your girlfriend just saw you on Twitter buying a ring for her by virtue of facial recognition and auto-tagging.

Always-on glasses constantly recording and uploading video are at least very illegal in Germany. I know we are sometimes too conservative and risk-averse but always-recording AR glasses are a bit too much.

I thought Google Glass had some success within companies?

It currently is having success in enterprise, albeit probably in environments where everyone signed a waiver or Google said they weren't beaming data from the glasses anywhere the company didn't want it to go.

> why are AR glasses going to be the tech to bring society down?

The people that are against it are more of the position that it isn't the technology, but those that control it. As techies it is easy to see all the benefits and not think of the downsides. We are a niche group after all, but that is easy to forget (especially if you live in SV). As techies we use ad blockers and have tracking blockers. But as we've seen with this wave of tech, our data is valuable and highly sought after. There are campaign after campaign to make us believe that it isn't worth much while the largest companies in the world thrive on it and the most dystopian societies embrace it and quote Goebbels.

Every technology has benefits and drawbacks. The issue is can we mitigate the drawbacks while being able to take advantage of the technology? With forethought this is certainty and historically true (though historically it has been because we reigned technology in). But when we have companies offering to do social credit (not just China btw) and literally comparing themselves to Black Mirror and saying they'll do that, but in a good way? I for one am ready to pump the breaks a bit and be more cautious as we take this turn. It isn't Luddite mentality, but more that we should resolve issues with security and the control of technology as we move forward. The current top comment is mentioning decentralized systems, homomorphic encryption, mesh network, etc. It isn't anti-tech, but maybe we should focus on privacy first before we give away something that people have had all throughout history and the lack of has been showing to cause social problems.

I think the parent is worried about the possible mandatory ubiquity of AR devices more than anything. As long as skipping a tech is socially acceptable and does not impose impractical costs (try living without interacting with a computer or a phone in a big city for a month and see how well it goes), AR vendors will have to have consumers interests in mind. As soon as AR becomes pragmatically unavoidable, vendors can and will exploit their leverage to impose additional costs on consumers to their own benefit, because opting out of AR will be even worse than swallowing it whole (welcome to game theory).

This is true of all technology advances. See electricity, motorized vehicles, phones, email (or the earlier form, the telegraph), more generally the internet and computers. You can’t ride your horse everywhere anymore, if you want to contact a company, you can probably still write them a letter, but if it’s urgent, you’re going to want to call or email them. Technology changes things, whether you like it or not, and unfortunately you just have to get over that. Society doesn’t function the same as in the 1800’s, and that’s ok.

We didn't adjust to these. They were valueable. Everything since 2010 comes with warnings, and a whole bouquet of side effects

I used to want more, now I want less. Even if I can make my own HUD I wouldn't make it.

For some jobs though I'd be happy to try: emergency, medicine

We certainly had to adjust to those technologies, and all of them came with side effects in addition to being valuable, the same as the new tech we've seen in recent years.

In the 90s all anyone could talk about was how terrible TV was, the ballooning amount of time people spent watching instead of being social or going outside, etc. And I certainly spent more time actually watching and focusing on ads (commercials) then than I do on the web, where I block them, ignore them, or pay for them to go away.

Landline telephone was not something to adjust, it was quite a given, and we'd all pay a lot to have one, even pay per minute.

Can't deny that TV started to slip off on the wrong side of things but even then it wasn't as it is today.

The point is, most consumer technology is at penny stock level of progress in term of deep value.

Personally I have been moved to only use a desktop computer with Linux on it and switched to a Go Flip 3 dumb phone. It's helped my sanity quite a bit. I'm convinced tech peaked in 90s and the desktop dream was the best one.

Enthused by your comment I visited the vendor's website just to be greeted with:

"GO FLIP 3, with KaiOS 2.5, comes with Google Assistant to help you get things done like book appointments, make phone calls, and find answers on the go using just your voice." [1]

Resistance is futile.

[1] https://us.alcatelmobile.com/alcatel-go-flip-3/

Yea I know... sadly its the best option right now.

First off, if it's overwhelming or if it goes overboard, people just won't use it, so your example of advertisements on every surface and excessive tracking of what users are looking at and doing at all times will likely either not happen or occur but never be demonstrated in any practicable, user-facing way.

Second, even with Facebook owning Oculus and investing heavily into its success (rightly so, by the way, the Oculus hardware is phenomenal), they're only successful because other software developers have made such great use of their systems. In some cases, Facebook has bought the successful software/companies involves (Beat Saber...), but it'll take a long time before they establish both a top-tier VR hardware and software footholds.

Ah, you mean this future:

Keiichi Matsuda http://hyper-reality.co/

(or https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs )

My youngest would love that future. Left to her own devices she'd have the TV going, phone going, laptop going, listening to music with one ear while creating critter number six in sculpey.

Jesus, I can barely manage Reddit, Imgur and HN... that stuff looks right out of a nightmare.

But it does seem like the most likely human conclusion to schedule/task/todo/interests lists.

Yes, I can't wait for that future. It looks amazing. Not being sarcastic either, I want this future.

I'm confused... Have you watched the video?

Yes, I have watched the video, all the way to the reset in the end.

Why do you want this? I'm asking genuinely.

I don’t know why you think those technologies will show up in a new platform and dominate our society. We could make analogs to those things now and they either haven’t been implemented (because we have the sense to not let it be popular) or are not in a form to ruin our lives (yet) — audio surveillance, web tracking for ads, haptic feedbacks for mobile devices to tell us when someone “undesirable” is in our presence, etc

This read alot to me like the 1950s "kitchen of the future" advertisements that used to be in magazines. Our perception of the future is our present projected into our imagination. Humans prove to stay human, connected to nature and the world without being human-digital cyborgs.

I spend alot of time trying to envisage what I think the information aggregation "tool" of the future is/will be. A watch? Glasses? An AI assistant chip in our earlobe? Whoever thinks of that will be an interesting fellow.

The AR section was the funniest. I think China is more likely to build powerful products here than anyone else, the question is whether they see a need or not. IMHO AR requires a revolution in lots of other areas to be useful for the wide masses.

Facebook will implement the worst possible version of Whuffie? Ugh. Imagining that future makes me want to live in a cave even more than the modern web does.

As long as it isn't an advertising company (like Google or Facebook) producing it, I'd definitely try it. Hopefully Valve will make a good one.

It's exactly like the premise for Black Mirror episode "Nosedive"!

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