No, there aren't any boobs in this post. I was debating if I should flat out open up with breasts to really drive the point home but I decided against it. Instead, I'll give you an anecdote; you can look up a nice pair of breasts on your own time.
Tonight was a slow night at work, slow enough to warrant me propped back on a chair watching the time pass. New shoes, feet hurting, whatever. Slow enough for me to care about my feet hurting. Door opens; there's no bell but I know the sound of warm air rushing out of the building enough to know that the door opened, and in walks two customers; a girl and her mom. The girl explains she's looking for a type of tea, and the mom is just there being her mother. College aged girl. It was a mint tea.
She had really fantastic breasts. Yes I am 21, my brain is hard wired to notice the female body. Its a small solace at work. And I thought to myself, man. I bet my coworker would love to see this. If only I could send him a picture. Oops.
I just shattered my optimism about Google Glass. All because one actually very nice customer happened to know how to display her cleavage correctly.
What am I on about? Well, think about it. A very basic male practice, and one that can be a sore spot for people, is admiring pretty women with friends. If you haven't done it at least once you are lying to yourself. Not every guy has of course, but its something that guys tend to do. Boobs are nice. We like them. Its a thing men bond over, like a good beer. There's only one thing standing in the way in the state of Constant Breast Evaluation (copyright pending). Space.
If me and anyone reading this wanted to go out to a bar, grab a beer, and check out the ladies, we're required to get up and go to the same bar. Sure, there's a camera right in my pocket. But you know what? If I pull out my smartphone, aim it at a girl's chest to snap myself a photo for my bro, I'm getting punched in the face. Hence why I don't. So if I want to show my buddy what I'm looking at, I need to have my buddy with me.
Here comes Google Glass. Actually, it could end up being just about anything with a camera that I can direct with my head. People don't pay attention to where your head is nearly as much as your hands, and I'm almost 100% positive that Google Glass will allow you to change the commands for the camera. I know somebody will make an app for that if they don't let you by default. Let's pretend, for the sake of this post, that I have Glass. I have the camera work when I cough twice in a row.
Head back to that bar. I see a girl I like, look down at her chest for maybe a second - what guy wouldn't for just one second? - and cough twice. Just clearing my throat, ma'am. Fiddle a bit with the side of the glasses, and bam. Sent a picture of a stranger's boobs to my friend, without her really being able to know about it or stop me in any way.
I have reached Nirvana. A State of Constant Breast Evaluation.
Why stop there? Let's take this a step further. I look over at a guy who left this credit card on the table. Maybe I'm sitting near the register this time. Cough three times for video. People might think I'm smoking, but I now have a video recording of a person's credit card. All without ever touching it.
When I get home, take the video off, delete it from my Glass, freeze the frames on the computer, and bam. Shouldn't be too hard to get at least 1 from a night out on the town. Hell, just a simple glance could work; I'm sure there's a means of figuring out the security code using the number given. Probably.
Point is this. What Google Glass will do is shore up the one weakness the human brain has; an imperfect memory. Want to remember EXACTLY what a person said during a conversation? Record it. What about during a fight? Someone's license plate? What a cute girl bought at a grocery store? What someone was wearing? What their bank statement was, what they were talking about on the phone, it'd all be possible if you put even a mild amount of effort in to it. Why? Because pictures are more accurate than your memory, and now there's no way to really know if a person is actively recording you.
Think, for just a second, what that does to society. You are always being recorded, whether you consented to or not. You cannot duck out of the way of the camera because everyone is wearing it. Have a bad hair day? Someone is taking a picture of it, I can promise you that.
We as a society discovered something with the internet. We realized that you can take digital goods and pirate them, and it costs you nothing and has no consequences for you as an individual. Not really. In return you can get thousands of dollars in music, movies, and games. The barrier of payment was gone.
Google Glass removes the barrier of social consequences. People don't take pictures of hot chicks all the time because its frowned upon, but what happens when everyone can take pictures all the time, and you can never tell if they are or not? Do you think you'd be able to tell exactly where they're looking? You can't even do that now, and you're lying if you think you can treat everyone wearing Google Glass like they're recording you at every moment, because you won't. People don't act like that, or Facebook would have a lot less break-up drama.
So that's the future guys. Its not pictures taken hands-free of smiling girlfriends or neat food. Its guys at bars taking pictures of tits, and early-adopters taking pictures of credit cards and checks and everything else they can look at because now their memory is perfect. And then in the same breath looking at a beautiful sky and taking a picture of the sunset to send to their brother. The big question is going to stop being "what is infringing on my privacy" and become "what is private?"
Let's just think about this for a second. Because Google Glass is going to happen, whether its good for society or not, and when it does, everything changes. Nothing is private, nothing is out of reach, nothing is your sanctuary. That's the society of tomorrow. Be ready.
I for one, will give it a toast with as many pictures of breasts as I can send to my friends.
First. You're putting the pussy up on a pedestal.
Second. You are right, GG ubiquity will mark the moment when I think a lot of people will stop and seriously ask themselves what role cloud connectivity plays in their lives. Sure my iPhone in my pocket keeps me connected, but I don't wear it and it isn't in my constant frame of view. I can still hide from it, and it from others. The coffee shop in my neighborhood has a sign that says 'no cell phones in line' and I really like that they make an effort to spell out their expectations of manners to their patrons. I think we'll start seeing a lot more of that happening. As long as GG is clearly discernible at least. I was at a department store recently and took a picture of a sweet pair of shoes and was asked to delete my photo. The person even waited to see that I did. There will be a increased alertness in behavior. You'll hear "Excuse me sure, is that Google Glass?, You can't wear those in here." Never mind that you have them mounted to your prescription pair. And guess what? Truth is, most places are private. We'll all start to realize that even more once we begin wearing cameras on our heads. But sure, there will always be the creepy guy that has every angle figured. The snake. But that dude has been around way before GG and will be around beyond its significance. Rest assured though, that that person is not really living, but only watching. Life is not a spectator sport. And believe me, actually touching boobs is WAY better.
Oh no, I know touching boobs is way better, but some of them are really nice man. If a guy had a really well shaped penis I'd comment on that too.
The problem is that we are still barred by a social barrier from doing things we know we shouldn't, and Google Glass removes a lot of that by making it impossible to tell what a person is doing. So yes, the nuclear option for a store is fine; you can say No Google Glass and it'll halt every problem I'm talking about...in that store. Guess who isn't going to say no? Large companies.
Starbucks isn't going to tell people not to wear something. We can't even tell people to leave the store unless another customer complains they're disruptive. These large corporations that have been built up for quite some time now are based around customer first, and that means bending over backwards for them, and that means letting people wear Google Glasses.
We'll see how each place responds though. It won't be a uniform standard of no glasses or yes glasses, because I can guarantee people are going to complain if their face computer isn't allowed in a store.
I'd wear the shit out of google glasses, only if I can have an App that let's me put mustaches on everyone.
Dude. That's funny. Too bad for you there is no such thing as dick cleavage. Yet.
And why mustaches? Why not put a nice pair of boobs on everyone?
I get that your post was about Google Glass, and rightfully so. But isn't Google Glass just a part of the times? I mean, if I walk through a busy city, I probably am being recorded a lot. And no, people don't have cameras on their glasses yet, but cameras are still everywhere. I'm sure there are guys already snapping pictures of girls tits, without their knowledge. Its the whole "creepshot" thing that was going on in Reddit not too long ago. And lets face it, these people were not breaking the law, they were just being creepy. Out in public? at a restaurant? Bar? On the street? You can and will be recorded. Thats the reality of the world we are in. I don't think Google Glasses will have as big an impact as you think. Personally, I have a gf and one of my friends sent me a pic like you suggest, I'd message him back or whatever and let him know that thats not ok, and creepy to boot. Basically, because the option is there, you just have to know when and how to filter yourself. Gotta ask yourself, would I like my photo to be taken right now? likely not. Comes down to human decency. I like to believe that most people are decent.
Somewhat. Its what's looking like one of the final moments of this era in human behavior.
History can be divided up a number of ways, and yes I mean Western history for this argument, but a very effective way to help understand what the future will hold is to divide the past up by what caused actual changes in lifestyle on a mass scale. A better phrase would perhaps be fundamental. Let's go through a quick list.
The most obvious one is agriculture. You change society from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and thus civilization, great.
Then pottery. You can now store things. Awesome. From pottery, writing. Writing lets you keep records, that means taxes and that means a government. These are the three base changes, really what'd be considered the most important ones in Western development (and relatively fundamental to each culture).
These are technologies which fundamentally change how you live your life, not just make it more convenient or fit in to the existing model of the world, but fundamentally alter what is happening to society. The printing press is a good example of these fundamental shift technologies; it means writing is no longer sacred, it means everything can now be checked, and it means you no longer have to memorize everything. Its all written down.
In recent times, we've had less. The closest one that can be said for certain is the advent of the industrial revolution. Everything since the Industrial Revolution has been recognizable to people in our society; if you look at life before it, you'll have a hard time actually understanding what it'd be like to live without regular work for regular wages. The Industrial Revolution changed us fundamentally, because it meant we had regular jobs and no longer made everything by hand.
It changed how you married too, because it brought about trains, and trains mean travel. That means you can marry outside of the village, and if you really feel like it, run away. Marry for love, if you want. That's historically a rather new concept for people who aren't aristocrats; relationships for love and not just for social obligation or economic reasons.
There's another factor that's key to all of these technologies or developments; they all came from their own times. The Industrial Revolution did not come from the mentality of an industrialized society, it created that mentality. It was someone taking the medieval workshop of the time and taking it to its logical conclusion, and in doing so, they changed everything. That's Google Glass.
Its recognizable technology. Cameras, computers, wifi, heads-up-display, voice activation. None of these are particularly revolutionary technology, nor are they put together in a way that is entirely foreign to us. Its glasses. So what? It just takes what we already have - portable computing - and takes it to its logical conclusion: a hands free, augmented world.
Now, its not going to be the final product that does this; very few things are, but its part of the next step of augmented reality that is going to alter how we function day-by-day. It changes the last bit of our memory from what we had prior to the advent of writing, because after all, if you can always just google it, who cares about memorization? As the technology advances past the glasses, to the point where it can't be seen, to the point where it's integrated in to our every day lives, what then? I can't even speculate what that world is going to be like; if I try it's all just science fiction.
There's going to be a time when I can walk in to a store and I've already paid for the products that a computer tells them that I am going to buy based on the data it has stored for the past four years of my purchases, and while I say thanks to the cashier I'm going to be watching a stupid video on YouTube while chatting with a friend. Maybe it'll end up being the end of socialization as we know it, maybe it'll change how we pay, but Google Glass is that first step towards augmented reality and the world that lays beyond that is so foreign to us in this moment that even my speculation, simple as it is, is going to end up being irrelevant.
We haven't had something like this for a long time. I could do a whole dissertation on the subject, how our basic functionality hasn't shifted for over a hundred years, and now we're about to. There's maybe 30 years before what we do changes. Think about that.
Tangentially related: People wearing Google Glass at a social events is going to be awful. I just imagine everyone at a party live-blogging the party instead of interacting with each other or one person talking and everyone else looking interested while reading reddit.
Just imagine having a conversation with somebody that is wearing GG, face to face. Everything changes. The conversation you have, the topic, the facial expressions you make, the language you use, how much you drink, what you eat, even what direction your gaze falls passively scanning the crowd. If you expect GG at a social function, it will change what clothes you wear, who you show up with, and a million other things for many people.
Think of someone at a party walking up to you with a camcorder in their hand pointed right at your face, and just starting up a conversation with you, pretending there wasn't a camcorder in their hand. I would be filled with the desire to just get away.
But that's just because we are used to a certain paradigm. You can't stop the march of this kind of tech into ubiquity, and the entire fabric of our social norms will be re-written over time in response. I don't see a way around that. The strongest privacy protections enshrined anywhere for a people collectively are probably right here in the US Constitution or maybe in law in a few places in Europe. And look at what a joke those are.
Hrm, perhaps a solution to the breast thing would be that each google glass has a privacy feature that acts sorta like an invisible shield. You opt-in to this feature, and your glass will send signals to other glasses that you don't want to be contacted or photographed and so on. If someone is around with that, taking a picture/video of/with them won't be possible. They'd have to get out of the screen or maybe even some photoshop magic would happen where they just disappear from videos and photos.
As for the credit cards and personal privacy, that's a bit harder... I mean, the law states that you can pretty much record someone on public property. This is only just really making use of that law. I guess a solution would be the have everything go through the glass. So, someone has to pay via credit? Google glass will do that, no need to take the card out. Alternatively, credit cards could also change. I know this misses the larger point of your privacy concerns, but I'm just speculating on potential solutions for fun.
I find it a bit sad that things are going in this state of constant surveillance, but what can you do? This seems to be the future people want. I still have this minor unverifiable suspicion that this is really a generational thing. I think future generations won't like all of these things as we do, and we only like these things because we've been from an era in which contacts, memories, photos were constantly lost. Maybe the future will grow to appreciate this losing of memories, ideas and so on and no one will see the appeal of Glass or maybe even the always remembering Internet as a whole.
Honestly what I find crazier is that if google glass takes off, nearly everyone will wear glasses. I know about the valid privacy concerns and everything, but I just find THAT the oddest thing out of google glass.
What a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, it'll doubtless be easy - and fun - for programmers to circumvent, and then it's just the same kind of false-promise reassurance as, for example, Outlook being able to "recall" emails (actually, just sending another email that tells the receiving email software, if it's Outlook, to delete the original email).
These technologies will also allow the creepees to monitor the creepers. If someone's taking a rather candid photograph of you, your recording apparatus will also be running, so you can out them. The technology can be used for good (recording acts of oppression, for journalism?) or bad (voyeurism, shaming, the usual police state crap). Russia has dashboard cameras, perhaps we can expect something similar elsewhere. Cyclists have benefited in the past from wearable cameras, when recording dangerous drivers, etc.
It will be interesting to compare how people react to this, compared with CCTV (which already offers a ridiculous level of surveillance, especially in the UK where I live). Would you be more bothered by the person sitting next to you on the bus filming you with a hidden camera, or a dumb black hemisphere on the ceiling taping you?
We've managed so far to avoid confronting the problem of defining privacy, since the surveillance has happened at an impersonal level - all of the cameras in public can be justified by "crime prevention". But when everyone has a hidden camera, what will we call it? Voyeurism? Sousveillance? Journalism?
Will they really though? Let's pretend this technology hits smartphone levels. Its suddenly everywhere.
How do you know if the person takes a picture or is just looking? Will that be the new social interaction, a world where you constantly check for subtle clues that a person is recording you? What if you aren't facing them? What if you're not thinking about it?
There's so many new developments that brings up. The smartphone changed how we worked; the 9-5 day died with the smartphone and now you no longer have isolation in the social sense. So what happens when we can no longer escape the job of behaving "properly."
The dumb hemisphere doesn't judge you. I've worked those shitty jobs. Nobody behind that camera cares about you, but if its attached to someone's face? They care a whole lot.
I'm not arguing against Google Glass. Hell, i'll buy one. If its safe i'll also probably use it for less than legal purposes. But there are changes that come from a society with perfect memory, and they're so vast and complex its hard to understand.
When I was growing up, we (me, my siblings, people in my class, etc.) were taught that if you weren't in your house with the drapes closed, you were In Public (TM), and should dress and act accordingly.
This reasonable expectation has obviously changed. I don't know exactly when, just that its been sometime in my life span. I don't know how people have begun to expect privacy in decidedly non-private situations, like restaurants and gyms and parks and buses... but they have. And I certainly do not understand why, as the slow march of technology has continually and quite loudly made things less, and not more, private.
If Google Glass can successfully kill what I can only understand as the ridiculous notion of Privacy-In-Public, the better off society will be. I think everyone could use a not-so-gentle reminder that the default (and only sensible) position is "not private unless you take drastic measures to be".
- People don't pay attention to where your head is nearly as much as your hands, and I'm almost 100% positive that Google Glass will allow you to change the commands for the camera
You are right, people don't pay attention to where the head is as much as we do the hands. That brings up an interesting point. As things like Google class start becoming pervasive in society, our focus will shift. It's a seemingly small change, but perhaps it will force people to look one another in the eyes?
I do think people will be more suspicious of one another, which is a bad thing. Perhaps a nice pair of boobs should remain something to be recollected with friends as opposed to broadcasted.
Within the. next 10 years this type of product will be as ubiquitous as smart phones. -they will be smartphones. You'll see restaurants and other establishments forbid the use of them. There will be places where you can go to "escape" them.