Quoting Nilay Patel
Simon Willison Simon Willison
Nilay Patel argues that functional augmented reality glasses require continuous camera recording and cloud processing of visual data, which inevitably creates privacy violations. Current technical constraints mean viable AR glasses must either send real-time video to remote servers or use a device as large as Apple's Vision Pro with an external battery. Patel suggests society should consider whether the privacy costs of such a product outweigh its benefits.
Why it matters
The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. [...] Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Those are the current choices in this world. And it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy. And maybe you shouldn't. Like, there's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope, the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it. — Nilay Patel, The Vergecast Tags: ai-ethics, augmented-reality, nilay-patel,
