Google's Project Glass: A Threat to Humanity?

Despite the relatively sparse details on Google’s latest gadget, the glasses have already been called genius, stupid, a gimmick, and the future of technology. What Google’s glasses have yet to be called, is a threat to humanity. Hear me out; they kind of are.

Google’s glasses and other projects like it pose such great danger because they mark a divergence from previous devices, providing an integrated and completely immersive user experience. Among the plethora of possibilities that comes from opening this Pandora’s box, the greatest threats of Google’s glasses are that they: directly endanger users, threaten the privacy of users and unconsenting bystanders, and encourage advanced levels of social detachment.

Physical Danger:
Head-up-displays (HUDs), like those found in Google’s glasses, have been used for years in military aircraft. If there were safety problems with HUDs they would be known.

June 26, 2007 -- Major Gregory D. Young of the Air National Guard flew his $32 million dollar F-15A fighter into the Pacific Ocean while on a training exercise. The aircraft was destroyed, and the pilot killed. Young, 34, had over 750 hours of flight time in F-15s. He made no distress call, no attempt to eject, and there was no aircraft malfunction. Data from Young’s helmet showed not only that he was sitting upright, likely conscious, at the time of impact, but also that he was looking up and slightly to the right, not at the ocean in front of him, at his head-up-display.

Young’s incident was rare but not isolated. Even though pilots train for hundreds of hours to look past HUDs, and those HUDs are simplified to an aesthetically minimalistic level that makes Apple products look like bloated gluttons, the danger is real. Imagine then what happens if users aren’t trained for hundreds of hours. What happens when the HUDs aren’t so minimalistic. If anybody can pick one up and use it while walking, driving, or working (a video to help you visualize). Talking or texting while driving are known dangers, to take it as step further and give people HUDs with Google’s glasses is just reckless.

Privacy Threat:
Google’s glasses poses a major threat to privacy as well, and while these issues are present in current-generation smartphones they are taken to new heights by Google’s glasses.

First and foremost on the list of privacy problems are the glasses’ ability to track users’ ever location and record what they are doing with its onboard camera. To believe that this sort of data tracking and monitoring would not be employed is naive. Smartphone apps already use location for targeted advertising, and Intel and Microsoft are planning on incorporating user targeted advertising into television (as we reported in late June). The potential for marketing products with Google’s glasses by taking advantage of user information is too great to be passed by. Admittedly, this is only a risk to those consenting to wear the glasses. Far more critical is the privacy threat to the unconsenting and unaware.

The power of putting internet access and a camera in the eye of every user is enormous. Not only do you remove any semblance of security against surveillance, but you also bring into question just how much a person knows about you. You can, with the flick of an eye, take a picture of a person and know everything about them without ever raising their attention. Similar concerns raised over smartphones hardly seem relevant because, unlike with smartphones, your subject would have no clue as to your actions; it would appear as if you were doing nothing at all.

Social Detachment:
The greatest and most speculative danger of Google’s glasses lies in their ability to augment reality. The more engrossing a technology the more likely people are to become involved with it in unhealthy ways. This has already been seen with addiction to cellphones, and video games -- in April of 2011 a gamer died of a blood clot after sitting too long playing Halo 3 on Xbox. By giving users the capacity to shape and reshape reality at a whim, Google’s glasses play towards narcissistic and escapist tendencies. A concern reminiscent of the driving conflict of the Star Trek: Next Generation episode “Hollow Pursuit”, in which crew member Reginald Barclay becomes addicted to living in the artificial worlds he creates on the hollodeck. Or perhaps one better remembers the 1992 film “Lawnmower Man” in which the lead character conquers an artificial world and declares “I am God here!”

Most users would likely not sink to these levels of social depravity and ineptitude, but the potential is there. And if the lesson from these stories rings true -- that the more control we gain over our surroundings the more those surroundings will tend to reflect our own narcissism -- then, with Google’s glasses, society will see more people become addicted to a point of fault than ever before.

Not all bad:
I have to admit now; I am in love with the idea of Google glasses, and will be even more jazzed if Apple jumps into the game (Sorry, I’m a Mac). Not to be non-deterministic, but the truth is Google’s glasses don’t even exist yet. No one knows exactly what the glasses will actually be, good or bad. As with all technology there are risks that we must try to avert, but for now to argue on the positive or negative aspects of Project Glass is silly.

Fundamentally the discussion of Google’s glasses should raise interesting questions for both humanity and the technology though. Questions like: What does it mean to be human? Where do the lines of digital and physical world begin and end? And are there any lines at all?