Displacing a vast amount of labor is what makes the numbers make sense. We don't know if they'll succeed or not, but it's obviously what they're chasing.
In addition to actual lost jobs, replacing a skilled white collar worker with a fungible operator of AI lowers the salary for that role significantly.
The labour needs to be eliminated — essentially nobody in the economy paying them for an equivalent job — for enough money to be freed up for it to work. But then these people who are either unemployed or job sharing some remaining work don’t have the money to buy the products of all the AI companies’ customers. At the necessary scale it will trigger economic demand collapse.
Have they thought about the expenses in running continental Death Pits?
OK, dumb attempt at funny over, but certainly someone is thinking about instability costs? Even if everyone is super cool with literal Death Pits, they don't run for free. And not everyone will be cool with watching their entire family die, which will mean substantial costs in security - and money spent on security, that's just setting money on fire, that money doesn't work any more.
I know they've batted around the ideas of "compliance collars" and suchlike for the guys running the Death Pits, but I haven't seen anything that wouldn't be ultimately defeated by a typical zoo chimpanzee, let alone a psychopathic Delta Force guy with more advanced degrees than your entire family. He will not be pleased with your "compliance collar" thing.
And the brain control chips they've been trying to get working . . well, they're not ready yet. You'll just make the Delta Force guy even crazier .
The best concert I ever went to was one I only knew about from a TV commercial. Somewhere along the way I started blocking ads and commercials aggressively and in hindsight I've noticed that (for example) there's fewer movies/concerts I'm seeing because I've cut off a mechanism for learning what's out there for subjects I'm not in the habit of actively researching.
After 30 years I've stopped watching baseball altogether because the announcers read tiny ads between pitches and at-bats and I can't stand it.
I accidentally let myself get too extreme about deciding that ads are evil. Not surprising I regret that, given the nature of extremism. For better or worse ads are a kind of information, and I should remember that I'm an adult and can tell the difference between the facts and opinions there in.
The tech giants owe their success to people accepting this new business model in which revenue can scale without the company having to scale headcount proportionately. In other words, automated customer service, automated everything.
My idea of an alternative to a modern phone would not let Meta/Google anywhere near it. I'm curious how many people would go out of their way for this kind of hardware but still use those. I thought the point should be making your own choice about what apps are "essential", not going down the path of least resistance and using the ones we're told are "essential".
It's hard to believe that in the late smartphone era there are people who think they're not online enough already, and want smart glasses so they can be even more online.
Well, I kinda wouldn't mind glasses that could show important notifications or maps. It could be handy for lots of things, like a heads up display. Not to watch the social feeds but to find my way or read a message from a friend saying they're late. When I use my phone or watch to navigate it's a bit more dangerous. Thinking specifically of one time when I fell badly doing just that.
I absolutely wouldn't want them to incorporate a camera though. They should not have one at all.
And I would want them with open firmware from a respectable company or organisation. So these ones are a non starter obviously.
The problem I see is you're going to want a camera built-in for vision reasons for your amazing reality-overlay, and at that point, well, you've got a camera built-in.
I'm sure you could do that without one. Gyro, accelerometer, compass, GPS, step counter, altimeter. Should be accurate enough for basic navigation. Especially with some smart dead reckoning algorithm that calibrates itself at known map points like when you turn a corner. Showing notifications shouldn't need any kind of AR awareness at all. You could just show them above the normal field of vision just like the Google glass did.
Again there the problem was not the display, it was the camera. And Google glass didn't even use it for any tracking purpose.
I don't think the issue is that it can't be done without the camera. I think the issue is that the whole product exists to get those cameras out there. Data is the new gold, those vision AIs need to be trained. So they've never even tried without one.
Where is the exact line - i.e. can you use Lidar? Infrared depth-sensing? Or do these provide too much data such that the scene could be recreated?
(I'm exploring this as a thought experiment, in general I agree that people shouldn't be carrying hidden cameras on their faces, and if those cameras are at all connected to Meta then it's much worse!)
Well lidar in that form factor would end up just being an 8x8 laser DoF sensor like some smartphones have. There's no space or power budget for a real lidar.
That would be ok I guess. That's not enough to capture much of anything even with a continuous feed.
There are all kinds of products that we need to reject not because the fundamentals aren't awesome for some proportion of people, but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
The dumb speaker that OpenAI is hoping you stick in your home to spy on you is not some preposterously worthless piece of crap from beginning to end without exception. It's just a creepy mess that's nowhere near worth it for anybody who cares about themselves or anyone who ever visits their domicile. That doesn't mean that it isn't pretty nice to have your hands full of grease and be able to get a small piece of information using your voice.
All about the details. You want to ethically produce something private at reasonable cost without excessive energy usage to serve useful functions, sign me up. Just no cloud, no privacy invasion, an entire impossible wishlist for companies not as cool as e.g. Framework.
> ...but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
Because the business owners figured out that they could get you to pay for things that turn you into an even more valuable product.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no reason to believe there will ever be a reversal of this. Not enough people care, and there isn't enough demand for "clean" products to displace the big companies. People aren't going to pay $1,000 for a privacy-respecting version of a product that's available for $200.
As I see it, the only solution (if you really want one) is to reject the idea that every aspect of your life has to be tech-ified. To say no to digital crack because you recognize it's rotting your brain, harming your relationships, etc.
You don't need to stare at a screen 15 hours a day for work, education, information and entertainment. You don't need your watch, television, speakers, glasses, fridge and toilet to be connected to the internet. You don't need a smart phone or watch or pair of glasses to be the "load-bearing" foundation of your relationships with friends, family and community.
Well my family doesn't live in the same country and most of my friends I don't see every day yet I communicate with them daily. Same with the communities I'm in, they're really active online.
And all my stuff is connected yes but not through big tech cloud. It is pretty easy to avoid all that. I use home assistant and I buy stuff specifically because it supports local connectivity. The biggest issue is whatsapp for now.
I won't dismiss that technology can be great for keeping in touch with people (especially family) who are not physically close to you but we should also acknowledge that there's a huge difference between digital interactions and face-to-face connection. There is a compelling body of evidence that the latter provides far more emotional and mental health benefits than the former.
Anyone truly interested in their well-being should make sure they're not treating digital interactions as a 1:1 substitute for real-life connection.
I kinda have that though. I use a home assistant voice preview speaker, connected to a locally hosted whisper instance backed by Qwen 3.6. All local and fairly energy-reasonable :)
Just saying it's not impossible to have your cake and eat it.
Yes however the server for all that did not cost a hundred bucks. A lot more than that :P Of course it's not the only thing I use it for either, and I view it as an investment in learning too. And it wasn't terribly expensive either. Two GPUs of 500 euro in total and 100 worth of components, the rest was all surplus stuff I had from upgrading my gaming PC. Then some dockers for things like whisper (and home assistant's "wyoming" wrapper around it) and ollama etc.
The only issue right now is that home control is relatively slow because home assistant plonks way too much context into the pipeline. It would work much better with an elective tool model like MCP but they don't have this yet.
PS: You could also choose the new Pine64 voice thing, It's looking pretty decent. It wasn't out yet when I bought mine.
No but it would be handy. I don't really need my smartwatch to read notifications either but it's super handy when I'm out and I have my hands full. This would be even better (and replace my smartwatch I'm sure).
I would take a camera with AR integration. I'm imagining some mashup of scrap book note keeping in digital space and technical work like car repairs or utility work. Imagine seeing where the studs are in the walls, or finding a now you left yourself in the engine bay of your car...
Much of the content on social media is "advertising" of some form, even when the "creators" aren't paying to boost it. Someone is trying to sell you something/"influence" you.
Facebook benefits directly and indirectly from all the "creators" who think its platforms are critical distribution channels for their crap "content".
The concept of constantly taking images and storing metadata so you can remember where your keys are seems nuts but at the same time I could see it being normal.
Smart glasses are very handy and when traveling especially solo asking about what your seeing in front of you is handy/informative.
I can see when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls. Everything and anything we need to know will be presented in front of us.
Ok all the above sounds crazy to most, but ive enjoyed using my Metas since Oct 2023 (had to buy another paid April 2025) though Meta glasses are sh!t in terms of durability. So i can recommend smart glasses but not really Metas especially if you like to buy technology that lasts!
Positioning smartphone camera seems way easier then positioning your head for a good photo. What do you do when you want low perspective? Or an overhead view?
> when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls
Keep going with that line of imagination and it's easy to understand how even someone burned on the Metaverse could be excited about the kinds of pitches Zuckerberg must give for his future visions. (Legitimately exciting thoughts, w/optimist hat on)
Have you ever unintentionally recorded a stranger?
Have you ever took a photo or video while your in a crowd and other people you don't know appearred in either? Did you care about them and look for them to ask if it was ok that they were in the background of the media you took?
Pardon but I don't understand your question cause if you think of it all humans have done the above since the day cameras or video cameras existed.
Further, im pretty sure smart glasses to AI devices are the next big thing. Meta probably will not win the smart glass race as many hate them due to privacy reasons. Apple a privacy focused company could add tech to blur out and or anonymize faces of those in the background to calm peoples fears.
There is a world of difference between (1) a random individual collecting a few people's faces and voices and (2) a huge corporation nonconsensually collecting that information at a mass scale (and with location!) in an age when identity resolution is automated.
yeah like said Meta is probably not going to win this race but Apple could as it's privaccy focused and they could have as noted..blur out or anonymizes faces that aren't in your network. Apple already labels and tries to name faces it sees often in your photos and has done for years.
Something I appreciate about Samsung phones is that having a Samsung account is completely optional. I've never had one. If I accidentally click on one of the dumb AI features I'm not even allowed to use it without an account.
Steam gave me similar problems. In the process of trying to get in for the first time in a while to delete my account, I completed a successful 2FA but still couldn't log in because I had to prove I owned the account by providing extra information.
We've fallen so far from the days when the retailer let you just have the game you bought and then they were out of the picture forever.
In addition to actual lost jobs, replacing a skilled white collar worker with a fungible operator of AI lowers the salary for that role significantly.
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