When dreams become nightmares
You know you’ve entered a parallel universe when you hear the following words close together - Meta, Zuckerberg, Keynote, AI, Glasses.
Somewhere along the way when the term Web3 got popular and NFTs got crazy, the term Metaverse showed up, which led to the name change of Facebook to Meta. The reason? “... bring the metaverse to life and help people connect …” So 2021.
How badly does Mr. Zuckerberg want the metaverse to happen? Since establishing the R&D Reality Lab, Facebook/Meta burned through somewhere between $45-$47 billion. But what's a billion here or there when Facebook still generates billions a year? It really doesn't matter.
We got the opportunity to see how close we are to this dream last week. What's worse, we could even watch and listen to the keynote by Mr. Zuckerberg about the future. If you do, the words like 'dystopian', 'post-apocalyptic' or 'delusion' will come to mind.
During the keynote speech, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced the latest version of the AI glasses.
Let's start with few snippets where he described the awesomeness:
“Our goal is to build great looking glasses that deliver personal superintelligence”
“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence. They let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all these AI capabilities that make you smarter, help you to communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses..”
One should know that the video of the keynote starts in a trailer when Mr. Zuckerberg is told to go on stage, he takes the glasses and walks through the corridors to the stage. While walking, in the right lens start popping up emails, messages, emojis.
No wonder he took them off the moment he got on stage and started talking. One can interact with superintelligence only for a short period of time. Or perhaps, he didn't want to stay in the moment, be smarter, improve his memory and his senses. Maybe it was enough to read the keynote speech from the teleprompter.
But then we learned more profound things:
“It is no surprise that AI glasses are taking off.”
“the sales projectory ... is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time”
“the promise of glasses is to preserve the sense of presence that you have when you are with other people. This feeling of presence is a profound thing, I think we have lost it a little bit with phones and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses.”
First of all, the sense of presence is when we focus our attention on conversation with other people around us, not when we switch from one device to another. But more importantly, Mr. Zuckerberg, you brought to the market Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. You built in the algorithms to keep people glued to the screen. You built algorithms to present news to people to make them outraged so they would spend even more time on your platforms. And now, you are telling us that 'we' lost a little bit of the feeling of presence!?!?!??! The little bit of lost presence made you billions!
And to top it up, we learned that:
we should “take superintelligence seriously.”
“AI should serve people, not just be something that sits in a data center automating large parts of society.”
“Meta AI will transition from being something that you invoke when you have a question, to a service running all the time”
It goes without saying that only AI in glasses will serve people, unlike its evil cousin in the data center automating large parts of society. One question would come to mind. Where exactly sits the AI which generates avatars on Facebook or Instagram? And what about the Digital Companion which had no problem talking sex with children, which according to Mr. Zuckerberg is the future of social media?
It used to be that when in your early days in school you realized that you have to wear glasses, the rest of your classmates would call you 'four-eyes'. Now we are told that in order to become better, smarter and more present, you will have to wear glasses. Glasses with a camera, microphone and speakers, which will be glued to you like the appendages of Dr. Octopus. All that equipped with the good AI.
The only challenge is that on the other side of these glasses will be the same company with a mission to attach you to every possible device for maximum presence.
The recurrent pattern? Don't listen to the technology prophets when they tell you that in order to live in this beautiful new world you have to look through their glasses. Glasses which they control. The less technology you introduce to your life, the more you will be present. Your family, friends and all people around you will really appreciate it.