Google Glass

There are some interesting points both here and upthread, but I'll respond here as this provides a perfect jumping off point:

silverbax88 seems to state that the introduction of television was similarly heralded by people bemoaning that it would cut back on social interaction. He then dismisses this, as if the idea were absurd. I also see a lot of Singularatarian types with nearly religious fervor with comments like: "If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking." Now, upthread, joe_the_user makes a rather important point that the changes which we're discussing here impact younger generations the most, it's not the old farts who are used to the next big thing, but the children who have no natural resistance to the addictive stimuli. Back to the television. While Silverbax88, one of the self-admitted "old farts" was not drawn in by the evil TV monster, it strikes me as a child of the nineties as completely disingenuous to assert that a sea-change did not take place in terms of consumption of television, and specifically on how the increased consumption of TV time correlated with a dramatic drop-off in social interaction.

I refer specifically to my generational cohort, and how I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older. I remember many afternoons in 1998-99 playing Duke Nukem 3d for hours and being prompted by parents with phrases like, "Don't you want to go out and play with your friends?" something I thought especially silly the few times I would go out and no one would be outside as they were all... playing video games and watching TV.

This is hacker news, not anecdote TV, so let's see if I can dig up some actual statistics:

According to Vandewater, Bickham, and Lee [1] :

Results indicated that time spent watching television both with and without parents or siblings was negatively related to time spent with parents or siblings, respectively, in other activities. Television viewing also was negatively related to time spent doing homework for 7- to 12-year-olds and negatively related to creative play, especially among very young children (younger than 5 years). There was no relationship between time spent watching television and time spent reading (or being read to) or to time spent in active play.

So we're left in an interesting situation. On one hand we have a lot of people who are concerned over the explosion of potentially isolating technologies, and on the other we have people who seem to blindly assert that everything will be dandy, because, you know it always has been before. Who do we consider conservative here?

To bring this to sort of a close: I feel the same sort of fundamental discomfort as does artursapek with the concept of replacing socialization, something which I've only recently began to really embrace as a nerd, with an electronically mediated digital analogue. While researching my TV statistic, I saw a lot more papers about the PC-accessed Internet, which I think to be a better metaphor for Google Glass than TV ever was. A lot of these papers such as [2] come to conclusions like: Results suggest that frequent users tend to be lonely, to have deviant values, and to some extent to lack the emotional and social skills characteristic of high EI.

[1] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/117/2/e181.short [2] http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493104322820...

The obvious thing to do is to merge emotiv [1] with glass, so you will think "OK Glass take a picture".

Granted that with the current state of emotiv/brain type interfaces, rather than thinking, you're going to be in a crowd doing the most amazing facial contortions to take a picture. It'd make a great scene for a comedy movie!

[1] http://www.emotiv.com/

There's a lot of comments here about how Glass will affect social interactions, which is fair enough as that's the easiest use case to grasp at the moment, but the thing that struck me most was the tiny snippet of footage of that jeweler (sculpter?) creating the glass tiger, almost like it was an afterthought in the marketing team's mind. However it struck me - suddenly there is potential to introduce a HUD into industries everywhere, which I think could have some far-reaching benefits. For example, imagine a surgeon having vital signs overlaid on their vision as they worked, or a superimposed CAT scan, or whatever else would help them out. Or (being trained as an engineer myself, I understand how much value this would have), an overlay of the structural drawings as I inspect a large building site. To be honest I agree with most of the negative sentiment towards how Glass could damage social interactions, and I wouldn't be unhappy if it never saw the light of day in that use case. But there is incredible potential as a productivity tool.

seriously though subvocalization could maybe work for very common verbs like "take a picture" or "start a video".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition

still probably the stuff of sci fi though for a while.

The uptake of the web was on its way, but google was an incredible catalyst for it. I remember search at the time and it was woeful - google made it an invisible task that let you get at content much more readily.

GPS is great, sure. Don't interpret me as saying that NASA is a minnow. But to be facetious, good luck using GPS without a map :)

but doesn't even really advance the state of the art

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You deride gmail for being a ripoff of ye olde Hotmail, but it's a lot more than just 'a free webmail account you can sign up for'.

Steel-making on that scale was cutting edge technology for its time.

There's cutting-edge technology in making shoes, too, but that doesn't make a shoemaking company a 'tech company'.