I think that when it comes to "the Google contact lenses dystopia" there is no better comment than a short movie "Sight" http://vimeo.com/46304267. (It starts with gamification of cucumber cutting.)
Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
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Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#12Dystopia? This sounds amazing! I assume that AdBlock will still exist, which optionally removes the one thing I felt even slightly bad about in this scenario.
At first I made the same mistake, thinking the headline writer was referring to this future state as a dystopia.
Instead, it's a candid admission that Pandodaily is a timesuck of low value linkbait, and that from this dystopian vantage point the article views a more hopeful future.
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#13Dystopia? This sounds amazing! I assume that AdBlock will still exist, which optionally removes the one thing I felt even slightly bad about in this scenario.
Positives sound great, but how about negatives?
Kind of like modern food is toxic and unhealthy, but hey it's cheap, there's lots of it and well... It doesn't taste that bad! Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to lean meat, fish, seeds and berries even though it costs me twice/thrice the money let alone preparation. And it can't be preserved as well. But whatever, fuck the dystopian future. :)
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#14I'm particularly disturbed by the notion that I'll be a pariah if I don't have some form of profile for people to check.
That sounds very plausible to me, and we're already seeing it on a significantly smaller scale.
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#15The article picks a curious line to end on:
"You know you have free will, but don’t feel like you need it."
Which is odd, considering that the protagonist of the tale has done nothing but make choices throughout the whole story.
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#16While it's likely I'd be the person not wearing Glass in 10 years, the scenario in the article shows a world in which people would likely not judge a person by their appearance, but rather what info comes up attached to their profile(s). Good for INTPs who don't care for chit-chat.
Are you sure that not having a profile won't make you an NPC?
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#17This is a dream come true. Where do I sign up?
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#18>The biophysio meter has been gauging the mood in the room, color coding them for convenience. Personally, you’ve always found that red hot conversations give you a headache while ice blue ones bore you to tears. The computer is able to pick up all the sounds in the room and sift through the conversations. You seek a color combination somewhat in the middle, a group of people not talking about sports or fashion. Actu…
+1.
I always hate it when I enter a party and the violent cacophony of five or even ten simultaneous conversations hits me at once. And even when I find a group of people I can stand, there's this awful noise all around. It would be pretty awesome if glass could not only find the people for me, but also actively filter everybody else, so I can talk in relative quiet.
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#19The article picks a curious line to end on: "You know you have free will, but don’t feel like you need it." Which is odd, considering that the protagonist of the tale has done nothing but make choices throughout the whole story.
When someone controls (and/or biases) the information feed you base your decisions upon, your will is no longer completely free.
We used to call it news media ;-)
Re: Google Glass in 10 years: the view from dystopia
#20This makes a number of assumptions that I think (based on historical trends) will end up proving false.
The first is that the services we use today (Yelp, Facebook, Google, etc.) will continue to be the dominate services of the future. Of course, the author probably just used these names for convenience instead of inventing new companies, but I have a feeling that the apps and services we'll be using 10 years from now don't exist today.
A more pressing false assumption is that all of these services (or whatever services are being used) will harmoniously work together. Though we have pretty strong inter-service collaboration currently (such Yelp telling us which restaurants our Facebook friends like), it is not that often that these platform relationships exist and even less common that everyone will be using the same interconnected services.
Finally, the assumption that is both the most necessary for this reality to be our future yet is also the most dubious is that with the dawn of quantum computing, algorithms will be able to properly interpret and predict human behavior. Thus far, algorithms fail pretty miserably at this (when was the last time you actually wanted to buy something suggested to you by Amazon?) and although the future resources available will have the capacity to interpret human behavior, it will be much farther in the future before we really will be able to utilize these available resources.
I still believe that always-on wearable computers with a constant information stream is where the consumer technology industry is heading (I've been saying this for years, and I don't necessarily think that Google will be the ones to perfect this formula). However, before we reach a society like the one predicted by this article, we (as computer scientists and mathematicians) need to become much better at interpreting and predicting human behavior. I think the first step in this is to understand how the brain works, which is probably going to be the most exciting facit of biomedical research in the coming decades.