At one point as I climbed the stairs and approached the second floor, I saw a group of five people wearing Google Glass, all silently staring off into space. I couldn’t tell if they were wirelessly having a conversation through their eyeballs, or just bored by the presence of real humans in front of them.
Nick Bilton writes from the Google I/O 2013 conference.
I love new technology. I love lots of new things Google is doing. But Google Glass scares me because people already disappear from reality into their phones — and that’s with a physical thing they have to make a choice to pull out of their pockets and use. And these are decidedly non-tech people.
Imagine giving those same folks even more immersive, distracting technology that they don’t have to make any sort of obvious external signal that they’re using? At least right now when some dumb parent drives through a school zone with their face down in their phone, you know what they were doing.
If they’re wearing a pair of Google Glass(es), you’d have no idea.
I think a lot of the new stuff we’re being sold in technology is too powerful for the average person. At least on a societal level. It’s like giving a 16 year old a brand new Ferrari for their first vehicle. Or maybe a loaded up semi truck.
And parents can’t teach their kids about proper phone/device usage etiquette because they don’t know how to handle it either.
As someone who loves new technology it worries me how poorly I see people handling and coping with new technology as it invades their lives. And it scares me that it often feels like I, the guy who loves new technology, am the only one noticing it.
It should be the other way around, no?
See also: Technology is Evil, Long Live Technology.
