Can I handle one more Silicon Valley tech conference? That’s what I was asking myself a couple of weeks ago after several days of interviews with evangelical US tech executives attempting, word-perfect, to sell me on the virtues of artificial intelligence.
How do these people have the energy to do that day after day, receiving delegations from all over the world? I found out late one night in Molotov’s, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district that has a digital phobia – it accepts only cold, hard cash.
“They are microdosing,” one of the bar’s regulars shouted at me over the hard rock blaring from the speakers. “Ketamine, LSD, you name it!”
I don’t know what 40-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is on, but he seems to have more energy and focus than ever since he’s grown his hair long and started wearing a T-shirt sporting the slogan “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, a play on the Latin term “Aut Caesar aut hihil” that means “either a caesar or nothing”.
I considered hanging around in San Francisco to attend Meta’s annual Connect conference but decided to head home instead. Without any microdosing, I was exhausted. That turned out to be a mistake, as Meta used the showcase to unveil a prototype of its Orion augmented reality glasses that have won rave reviews from reporters who tried them.
The glasses overlay digital windows of content on the real world you see through them. That’s not new, but the way they do so, with a wider field of view, the integration of AI, and the use of gestures, eye movements and voice commands to control them, appears to be much more sophisticated than anything that’s come before.
Zuckerberg told Connect that Meta has been working on Orion for a decade.
I love Apple’s Vision Pro AR headset, but it will never be a device you’ll wear out and about. The holy grail is a sleek pair of glasses that deliver the same functionality. After his dubious foray into building the metaverse, a virtual world Zuckerberg wants us to live, work and socialise in, Orion looks like it could be an actual hit – if Meta can make it work as a mass-market device.
But the day it does so it runs into the same problem with AR glasses that Google did with its product, Google Glass, released in 2013. To allow AR glasses to interpret the world around you, you need to include front-facing cameras. Google Glass-wearers quickly became dubbed “glassholes” as the glasses could record video. That sparked a privacy backlash as clips emerged online of videos secretly recorded on Google Glass. The hostility killed Google’s product before it could gain any traction.
Jump forward a decade and add AI to the mix and you have a bigger potential problem that was well-illustrated by two Harvard University students just two days after Orion was showcased. They managed to hack an existing product from Meta, a pair of US$400 Ray-Ban glasses equipped with cameras and AI, to enable them to identify people using facial recognition software.
The software analyses the video to detect faces. Upon finding a match with photos on the internet, it provides personal information about the person, scraped from web profiles. Students posted a video of themselves approaching strangers on the subway, identifying where they worked.
This is not a use of Ray-Bans that Meta endorses. But you can see how Meta’s plans for smart glasses could come undone in the same way Google’s did. Zuckerberg, who doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a privacy advocate, has his work cut out for him keeping the creepiness out of Orion.
