“Welcome to a world through Glass” is plastered in big letters along the top of the Google Glass website. The glasses integrate reality and the Internet into one picture. While driving, Google Glass can show you directions as if they are projected on the road in front of you. You can use voice commands to take pictures and record videos hands-free. In short, Google Glass tells us everything that we would possibly want to know.
But will it actually help us?
Innovation has made once-impossible tasks extremely commonplace. We step on a pedal and travel great distances. We make a phone call, and minutes later a delivery boy shows up to our front door with pizza. We even have a search engine on our computers that will answer almost any question. It sometimes seems as if effort itself will soon be a thing of the past, replaced by technology.
In fact, not only will our drive be in jeopardy, but a part in our brains may actually shrink. Yes, as in get smaller. A study of the brain capacity of taxi drivers in London concluded that before the GPS was invented, the grey matter in their brains grew to hold more information, such as a mental map of London. But with the advent of GPS, taxi drivers no longer had to use the map in their brains, and the grey matter shrunk.
Our brains, like our muscles, won’t get stronger if they aren’t used.
One might argue that great strides in innovation prove that our society as a whole is growing smarter. Yes, there have been strides, but only those innovators are heading to the “brain gym” and working their “muscles.” They are causing the consumers of their products to lose knowledge because, honestly, if you can look up the answer to a question with a few clicks, why even bother learning? The knowledge gap between the providers of innovation and the consumers of innovation will grow wider than it already is. The knowledge of innovators will keep growing while the knowledge of consumers will continue to decline.
Aside from that, our privacy as individuals will become virtually nonexistent. Google Glass can record videos without the knowledge of the participants and can even stream what it sees live to others—and we thought the NSA scandal was bad.
Our mugs will be plastered all over the Internet. I can see it now: “Come one, come all to the hybrid version of reality television.” Viewers will eat that up quicker than participants can say “Are you recording me?”
In the 1960s, viewers watched Star Trek in awe, marveling at the futuristic technology that people couldn’t imagine would ever exist. Well, one of those fancy pieces of outlandishly futuristic equipment was a cell phone—and as we all know, cell phones are indeed a real thing. Now, we watch movies like iRobot and brush off the possibility of robots roaming around and becoming smarter than the human species.
I’m not saying that we should all hide underground from dumb humans and intelligent computer-people hybrids. I’m just saying that we should maybe prepare for it.
