Let me throw out two predictions so obvious that I shouldn’t even have to commit them to print:
1) Within days, if not hours, of Google Glass‘s release to the general public, hackers will “jailbreak” the hardware, allowing it to run any “Glassware” users desire and can create or find online; and
2) An independent developer community will emerge to create those applications , whether Google wants them to or not.
As a matter of fact, I’ll double down and assert that both of these predictions are already in the process of coming true, even while Glass is in its “Explorer Program” phase, and that Google’s announcements this week that it won’t allow facial recognition apps or “adult” fare for Glass will only add fuel to the fire.
Porn, of course, is any device’s “killer app.” Enough people want it, and want it badly enough, that they’ll either have it from their devices or get OTHER devices to have it from. Above and beyond the usual — pedestrian porting of dirty pictures to Glass format, just like they were ported from print magazine to computer monitor way back when — I can’t imagine that more than a year will go by before there’s Glassware to predictively, imaginatively, visually undress whomever the user happens to be looking at on the street, on the dance floor, etc.
We don’t have to like it. It’s going to happen whether we like it or not, and whether Google likes it or not.
Similarly, facial recognition is the Glass-specific “killer app.” It’s the one thing that the device is so obviously useful for and that people will so obviously want to use it for that there’s just not going to be any stopping it.
The most benign and universal applications are obvious:
You meet someone, you get his or her name, you say “OK, Glass, this is John Doe.” You’ll never have to worry about forgetting a name again.
You want to introduce two people, but can’t be present. “OK, Glass, send John Doe’s facial profile to Joe Smith, with a message to meet him in the food court at noon.”
And so on, and so forth.
Are there more sinister uses for facial recognition? Of course there are. But facial recognition is coming.
Again: We don’t have to like it. It’s coming whether we like it or not, and whether Google likes it or not.
If by some chance Google is able to effectively darken Glass such that it can’t fulfill users’ desire for porn and facial recognition, then something else will come along with clearer vision. You’ll be able to pick up a Google Glass unit at Dollar Tree, like one of those little headphone-radio sets that people buy because they’re going to the beach and don’t want to risk getting sand in their REAL personal stereos.
The press is filled with nods — from Google itself, and from opponents of facial recognition tech — to something called “privacy.”
But privacy, as David Brin has been pointing out for years, just ain’t what it used to be. Absent complete technological collapse, it’s never going to be what it used to be again. If you show yourself in public, the assistive tech to identify you is going to be available. Period. And soon.
Instead of obsessing over the steady advancement of technology and attempting to thwart its potential at the development level, we should direct our efforts toward abolishing institutions which necessarily and murderously abuse that potential.
Technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, and more and more useful.
Political government is getting more and more expensive and less and less tolerable.
One of the two needs to go. And it’s pretty clear which one.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Through a Google Glass Darkly, Counterpunch, 06/05/13
This has already happened. The developer preview of glass was intentionally left unlocked so developers could muck around with it. The Android Debug Bridge tool which comes with the Software Development Kit(free download) can be used to sideload apps not in the Google Play store.
Your other prediction is probably right. In a years time, XDA Developers forum will likely be full of sideloadable apps for glass.
Your final point I agree with wholeheartedly. It is not Google I fear or distrust. The information I give to Google is part of an exchange, I give up certain 'privacies' by allowing google to know certain things about me, in return I get useful, life-enhancing services(google-maps/navigation as an apt example). This relationship, I would consider mutually beneficial, as there seems little incentive for google to harm me or abuse this relationship. When the government decides to get involved, that is a whole different story. Tracking that info, subpoenas, National Security letters, etc. A third party now is in on the relationship that has malicious intent, a parasite that contributes nothing and can potentially cause harm to me and others. There are many, many (but not all) technologies that we worry about, that would be completely benign, were government not a factor in it.
Buy the hardware and install a Linux version. Google Glass is a gimmick though.
This is exactly what I thought when I first saw the 'teasers' for Glass: I was in the middle of reading Cory Doctorow's "Makers", and literally the same day I read my first teaser about Glass, in "Makers" the Disney folks had just released their DiaB 3D printers and Lester had already got hold of a couple and enabled users to bypass Disney's proprietary firmware and over-ride the unit's "goop-specificity".
And of course they will be used for porn. Vast amounts of porn. Rule 34 (from 4chan: "if it exists, there is porn of it") is one of those things that, once you hear it, is absolutely obvious.
No way will it take a whole year for the bright folks on xdadev to produce not only a raft of addons, but a whole jailbreak and custom ROM/kernel replacement. The dev cycle for tweakers and hackers is fundamentally shorter nowadays, with crowdsourced beta testing and the complete absence of geographical constraints on dev-team membership thanks to sourceforge/github-style SVN repositories.
And what's more, the dev cycle is getting even shorter.
And you're EXACTLY on point about what happens when the parasites from .gov decide to stick their noses in to the tech space.
I wrote something along those lines in the late 90s in a comment on nanodot, pointing out why the State would deliberately stymie Drexlerian nano-manufacture (answer: because Statists get utility from the GAP in wealth and power between themselves and the average). Further, it seemed clear given the sociopathic, megalomaniacal (and short-horizon) nature of State types, they would also try to weaponise it.
It was while musing on the ramifications of State intervention in nanotech, that my anti-Statism hardened (it was already pretty intense, but thereafter was harder than Wolverine's skeleton lol).
LBNL: don't forget that while your exchange with Google appears mutually-beneficial at first blush, you might be ignoring the side effects of .gov forcing its way (through 'law' or plain old money) into the trove of information that Google acquires about you.
There is 'little incentive' for Google to abuse that relationship, until someone from .gov gets up in the face of someone senior at GOOG, or pays them a bajillion dollars to rat you out.
The reason I gave it a year is because that is when it is expected to be released to the market, and to the wider dev community. Right now there is a relatively small number of people who own them, and even smaller that are working on it. So right now XDA is looking pretty barren in the development section http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?….
" don't forget that while your exchange with Google appears mutually-beneficial at first blush, you might be ignoring the side effects of .gov forcing its way (through 'law' or plain old money) into the trove of information that Google acquires about you. "
That is 'exactly' what makes the exchange not mutually beneficial, take government from the equation and I would consider it to be so.
I know you were just throwing "a year" out there, and I hope you didn't think I was having a snark at you.
That said: broodplank1337 already has his own custom kernels available – forks from there or elsewhere will be picked up by Cyanogenmod and others of that ilk and improved upon.
Also, bekit (from CyanogenMod) has had a Glass for a while: he has already loaded ClockworkMod Recovery (an Android ROM/bootloader), which means that custom ROMs can be loaded.
As to the exchange between 'us' and GOOG, the sting is in the tail – and the tail is much longer than most internet users comprehend when they use GOOG services.
What we hand over is not just our eyeballs for stupid ads: we hand over vast amounts of information about ourselves, some of which might have consequences of which we are unaware. That information doesn't evaporate when we shut down Chrome or clear our cookies… GOOG has it, in perpetuity – which means that we are exposed to ANYBODY who, at any stage in the future, gets a green light to open Google's info vaults.
It is already the case that people will 'salt the earth' by posting defamatory material to 'dirty up' an individual's Google trace: they know that HR types are lazy and stupid and ALWAYS Google applicants' names – and because they are lazy and stupid they don't then go back to the candidate and seek an explanation: easier to jettison the application. Imagine if instead the HR type was able to simply find every interaction you had ever had through your gMail account.
Fast forward 10 years: GOOG will have a vast army of low-paid functionaries and bureaucrats in far-flung low-rent areas of the third world, who for $125 in bitcoins will hand over the entire GOOG-history of any individual.
It might sound far-fetched at present, but the same sort of thing is true of the pigs and the DMV: with the right connections you can get all .gov-held info on a person for about $100. It's been like that for almost half a century.
Back in the 1980s I first became aware of the ability to obtain information from cops who will sell access to records: had anybody told me about it in conversation without the ability to prove it definitively, I would never have believed it.