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> I think this is misreading Google Glass. People didn't like or want to use Google Glass because there was no "killer app" for them

I think the other reason why people didn't want to adopt Google Glass, is the stories about other people objecting to people wearing them–primarily because of privacy concerns, that the devices were capable of recording video, and that while a phone camera can record video too, it is somewhat more obvious if someone is doing it with a phone camera than with Google Glass. If a product is going to be a social hassle, if other people and businesses are going to object to your use of it, a lot of people will decide the negative social consequences aren't worth it.

Something like Google Glass specifically targeted to people with disabilities would be more acceptable, because someone using it can always say that it is for their disability, at which point most people would be more forgiving, plus if any business tries to ban it they run the legal and PR risk of being accused of disability discrimination.

Definitely this.

Although honestly i thought it was a bullshit argument. You can buy tiny disguised cameras. If someone wanted to creepily record you, they could easily do so and you would never know. They certainly wouldn't use something as ostentatious as google glass.

It's the uncanny valley between "might be harming me" and "is detectable by me."

People don't care about things they can't see -- because they can't see them.

But if something is seen, it probably shouldn't have cause to make people worry.

Google with Glass and Microsoft with Zune have shown that it's not always important to be the first mover if you can't generate hype and nail the user experience. Apple came in and cleaned up the music playing space. Now I suspect they may be about to do the same with AR.

Except that the iPod was introduced in 2001 and the Tune music player in 2006.

The Zune failed for the opposite reason: iPod had first mover advantage AND was a superior product.

Apple was far from the first mover.

Rio was there first with a better product. Apple had better marketing though and the rest was history.

Which Diamond/Rio player was a better product than the iPod at the time it was taking over (~2001)? Apple certainly had good marketing with those multi-coloured dancing adverts ... but the product itself was pretty great.

Apple had DRM at that time and required special software to use.

Rio worked with anything and had no DRM. Any Rio was superior to all early iPods.

Rio “worked” with “anything”

As much as I hate DRM, it isn't something most consumers care about. The real selling points like the iPod's storage, case, materials, and branding were mainly unmatched for a long time.

Hang on, any Rio? Like the 32MB Rio PMP300? Is there a Rio product that competed directly with the iPod in the era that it took off? Remember that iPods only worked with the Mac (and its tiny market share) until the latter half of 2002 and only really took off in 2003. Rio aka SONICblue went bankrupt in March 2003, they barely competed head to head with Apple in mp3 players for a few months.

Apple Marketing was pretty overwhelming, but I'm afraid the Rio line was already doomed by the time the iPod began to dominate.

Also important to note that while Apple were very successful in music players, there are several successful competitors in that market, such as Sony and Sandisk.

In fact at the peak, the iPod's market share in music players was about the same as what Android has in smartphones today.

Many commenters are rightfully pointing out that my Zune timeline is wildly off. My apologies, I deserve the downvotes on that one - I misremembered and should have checked before posting.

I don’t think this is right. I could use my AirPods to secretly record audio, and nobody seems to mind.

There isn’t a visible mic pointed right at them constantly.

Right or wrong, constantly pointing a camera at others gives off an air of “I could recording you right now”, and that makes people uncomfortable.

So true! I would quite like some smart glasses that can’t take pictures and record video. Just a private HUD for me!

“Glassholes”

Yeah, there’s a difference between someone having the ability to take pics in their pocket and having a camera pointed at you all the time.

Is it more of a reaction than a logical thing? Maybe.

Exactly, glasses are an even better example. They give you superior vision compared to what you would have naturally so almost everyone who needs them puts up with wearing them and they have even become a fashion trend in themselves by being so omnipresent. If I could have a pair of glasses for my brain that correct for any natural deficiencies then I'd wear the heck out of them, appearances be damned.

The nice thing about glasses is they never run out of batteries

I don't have to refuel a bicycle but I still prefer driving.

Glasses are a better example. I'm embarrassed I didn't think of them as I read the OP through the lenses of my own glasses.

A good indicator of just how normalized they are.

VR glasses also. I love the Quest despite it being half a kilo and barely staying put witout holding it.

People have shown time and again they will adopt something they love, no matter how grotesquely bulky, like brick cellphones

I'm sure the Apple Brain Implant will look "cool" and be highly sought after just like their other seemingly-odd gadgets did at the time of their inception (what is this "iPhone" thing?).

The iPhone looked cool, or at least not odd, from the start. AirPods would be a good example though IMO, that dangling "wire that stops after an inch"/earring-looking-thing is still strange to me but has become normal.

I neither use nor am a fan of AirPods but I appreciate the stem design. It clearly defines the orientation and maintains the classic Apple earbud silhouette, providing contrast that emphasizes the lack of wires coming out of it.

> [...] still strange to me but has become normal.

Social proof will do that. Doesn't matter how weird something looks, if the appearance becomes associated with wealth in the public consciousness, people will start thinking it looks cool and coming up with reasons why.

Apple won't release a product like Neuralink themselves until the tech is very mature. If anything went wrong with one and left someone in a brain damaged state it would harm their brand too much. Neural interfaces will come from new companies for a very long time to come.

I think real time language translation and speech to text could be a killer app for smart glasses and I’d love to have one when visiting a foreign country. Also, for people with hearing impairment, I think speech-to-text and maybe even sign-to-speak using the glass would be very helpful for interactions with people who don’t know sign language.(I’m not hearing impaired, so maybe I’m mistaken about this.)

Truly interesting glasses app would be the one to recognise people around you and show quick dossier about them collected from public sources. Unfortunately Google did not build one. That app would truly shake the society.

What’s the killer app for bci though?

Hand-free high fidelity input

Elon Musk says improving the speed of communication is the killer app. Typing with "meat sticks" is inefficient compared to the speed of thought.

Eventually using it to backup and data mine memories will likely happen, as in Black Mirror.

Using it to filter, annotate, and block parts of reality is also likely. Again, Black Mirror touches on this.

Some have posited the idea of gamifying reality, for all sorts of purposes.

I've often thought realtime logic-checking would be useful. Fact-checking would be more subject to biases in the software and data, but could also be useful.

Eventually the idea is probably that neural prosthetics will be developed that act as entire new brain subsystems.

I'm not sure what timescale Elon thinks this company is on, but even that first point is probably much further away than any new product team at Google could survive for (and no this is not a "Google is ADHD" joke, although that is also kinda true).

Additionally, an implant is pretty damn invasive. So some cute demos or niche consumer applications are not going to cut it.

IMO the two possible paths here are either this will be an R&D money sink for our entire lifetimes (maybe funded by Elon for fun, maybe some government grants, etc.) or they will primarily operate as a medical device company.

The implants they are developing are definitely a tech improvement, so they could realistically improve existing DBS treatments. The company could also work on their own novel DBS paradigms for treatment of specific diseases. A lot of DBS (especially for psychiatric diseases like OCD) is currently rudimentary AND we have a poor understanding of why it even sort of works. But it does clearly work for at least some subset of patients, so there are real avenues for continued development.

If certain lucrative professions, like daytrading, could see an edge from this sort of thing, even of a modest amount, then it would happen no matter how invasive.

Adult content and recreation is likely a very compelling market for a brain interface. It becomes less necessary to go through the usual ceremony (and the complexities that go along) of intimate relationships when you can get the same neurons firing with wetware and whatever payments look like at that time.

Google glass had a similar (though less impressive, though more believable) list of killer apps and didn’t do anything.

Target selection for a shoulder-mounted flamethrower.

Only response that sounds compelling. Plus we know that Elon knows how to make a flamethrower.

imagine being able to talk to GPT-3 in your brain. It would make you superintelligent although without being completely sure that anything it said to you was actually true.

Obviously this isn't going to happen, but imagining it from a scifi perspective - honestly that sounds kind of horrifying to me?

This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc.

Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population.

Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams.

Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.

Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.

> Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.

We'd definitely have to regulate the shit out of tech then. Going to example of phones - the root problem there isn't that phones are addictive, it's that every aspect of them is controlled by commercial interests that benefit from making them addictive and user-hostile. If we were to create BCI the way smartphones where - where the Googles and Apples of BCI will release a consumption-oriented platform you don't own ("because security!"), that serves primarily to access the Facebooks and Twitters of BCI, in the way the platforms tell you to (again, "because security!") - then it's game over for humanity.

If, however, we allow control over devices and their operations to be held by the user (to the extent it's unprecedented in this industry), and regulate social media like tobacco, alcohol and gambling, then we can reduce this problem to something comparable with alcoholism. Not ideal, but much closer to optimally balancing individual freedom with preventing fully predictable individual failure modes.

Cigarettes used to be a huge problem too, the regulation came after more people started to realize what was going on. Hopefully some regulation of social media companies is coming soon.

Bi-directional interfaces are not necessary for BCI to be useful - I would pay good money for a digital copy of my memories. Just think about how that could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's if they had a library of memories on-demand.

If it isn’t bi-directional what good is taking a copy of your memories out?

Are you envisioning playback on a computer screen?

Haha, reminds me of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Wheatley

The ultimate bullshitter.

Gross

I'd buy it if it could remember everyone's names when I meet them and remind me of them on demand