Are you looking forward to a future of casual but supercharged surveillance, in which inconspicuous wearable devices record everything private you do — ostensibly in service of making you "super intelligent?"
Evidently, readers, you are not.
Users on social media have responded with horror and outrage to a pair of smart glasses developed by a startup called Halo that its creators, a pair of Harvard dropouts, claim will feed you live AI-powered insights while logging and transcribing every conversation you take part in. So transformative will it prove to the human brain, the twenty-something-year-old inventors promise, that wearers will soon be not just thinking, but "vibe thinking."
Many were quick to raise alarm over the obvious nightmare this would be for personal privacy — not just for the wearers, crucially, but anyone they interact with.
"Have you ever read a description of the panopticon, a theoretical prison where one guard can see every prisoner at all times, and thought, man, I'd love to wear that on my face?" wrote writer and editor Mary Gillis on Bluesky, alluding to the work of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham that was later famously expounded upon by the French historian Michel Foucault.
It's an apt metaphor. What distinguishes a panopticon isn't merely inescapable surveillance, but the fact that you don't know when you're being watched. You simply have to live with the unbearable uncertainty that, at any moment, you could be.
Ditto for the Halo smart glasses, which are called "Halo X." One of its selling points is that the specs don't come with a visual indicator that lights up to let people know when they're being recorded, which is a feature that Meta's smart glasses do currently have.
"People don't want this," wrote Whitney Merill, a privacy lawyer. "Wanting this is not normal. It's weird."
Another promise is that by looking stuff up and remembering virtually everything with its "infinite memory" — allowing you to ask stuff like "who did I talk to on Friday?" — the glasses will make you super-duper smart, despite a growing body of research suggesting that relying on AI models leads to critical thinking skills atrophying.
As such, some mocked the deleterious effects this could have on our already smartphone-addicted, brainrotted cerebrums.
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