Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

" Think of it this way — if you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up — nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people. "

This scares me. I mean, notifications are already known to cause a great amount of problems, it is changing our brains, making our attentions spans shorter and more frail, I already hate even the fact I am carrying a mobile phone, it disrupts me, take away my attention from what I should be doing... SMS to me is even worse, it is very intrusive, distracting, and now that I got used in talking to girlfriends with SMS I noticed that I am getting "addicted" to devices, instead of people.

To me, Google Glass, and similar technology, is awesome, neat, interesting, but dangerous, very dangerous, it might have very serious consequences on how we work as biological beings.

Smartphone notifications certainly aren't 'known' to cause any long-term changes in the brain. The number of actual rigorous studies of the subject is tiny and results have been rather inconclusive so far. (It is known that individuals who stringently follow social media while also doing something else can be distracted by it. Fortunately that's not the only application of the technology.)

As for personal issues with notifications: You can just turn them off. I only get notifications for email that my filtering system can't handle, which means the sort of stuff that I would have had to carry a pager for before the advent of the smartphone. I get maybe a half-dozen unrelated notifications a month for spam that my filter didn't catch, and that number is going down. No Facebook or Twitter. No text messages or chats. Just the important email and actual honest-to-god phone calls.

I'm inclined to disagree. When I'm in class or working and I receive a notification I almost always check it. In most cases I wouldn't say that this is because I'm "addicted," but rather because I have a class of notifications that need to be handled quickly (job and fellowship applications, questions from my boss or the PI in my lab, etc). Most of the time I end up pulling my phone out and seeing that it's just a dumb text message or an email from a mailing list. With Glass I would be able to immediately see if any given notification was something that needed my attention.

From my experience, anything that comes as email or text is rarely urgent as we might think it is. If something is really serious, it's either you are working as 911 operator :) or people will call or come in person. You might disagree, of course, but wait 'till you enter the workforce and see how'd you deal with an endless stream of "OMG! Super urgent!" emails.

I think some sort of concept of "attention-condition" levels could and should be applied. These would be like "def-con" levels, but labeling the readiness of one to switch attention, instead of readiness to engage in military action. Saying something along the lines of, "Ok, Glass, set at-con 2 for the next hour," could do things like switch notifications to only a whitelist of people and message types. "At-con 5" would let everything through. "At-con 1" would only show you something from an even more restricted whitelist, or if a nuclear war started. ;-)

Now add in commands like, "Ok, Glass, set at-con 2 whenever I'm driving," or "whenever I'm in this building." And a person's distraction levels can be overall reduced by this device rather than expanded.

If you are able to, try disabling notifications on your phone.

I predict there will be regulation of hudphone use, especially where the operation of vehicles is concerned. A notification pop-up sapping a person's concentration at the wrong moment could be dangerous.

That's exactly why they decided to not it in front of your eyes, but just above.

That's not a problem when you got a self driving car.

> might have very serious consequences on how we work as biological beings.

its a little late for that.

but personally I liked getting a smart phone because it meant I didn't need to be around the computer and could still handle emergencies or react to opportunity. or just keep connected with people in different continents while walking through my city.

I think these devices are the gateway to getting away from the Television and a Typewriter interface. Its a way to get back to being present but still getting the advantages of being connected.

Not to mention another instance of technology that will interfere with people's abilities to drive. Remember the epidemic of people texting while driving. Now imagine a device that allows you to do that, as well as surf the web, read the reviews of the movie/restaurant you're going to, check sports scores and stock prices, etc. all at the tip of your tongue, and not made illegal to do so while driving, yet.

Just a random idea: A mode where notifications are batched up until the user is standing relatively still.

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