Hopefully, there will be regulations on the hardware that come in that make it really hard to just secretly record people. If not, smart glasses are just going to get banned in any functioning democracy. (People are only okay with being spied in sufficiently abstract ways, you see) Either way, the controversy isn’t going to blow back on the formerly blind.

In autocracies, god knows. Maybe they require a licence to prove that the user is “trustworthy”, that only people with government connections can get.

Sad to say I would not trust anyone who is constantly pointing a secret corpo camera at me. Even if its curing their blindness

Do those of you that despise smart glasses think you’ll have the same moral issues with optical implants?

yes.

What could be done to avoid the issues you have with the glasses when it comes to implants, if anything?

mostly nothing. it could be a solution if they could be easily verifiably made for anyone that these don’t have any wireless connections, or any kind of connection to a computer network. and that these have no capability of storing recordings. but this is not possible.

Do you intend to discriminate against people with augments if you live long enough to see them in widespread use?

Unfortunately, yes. just like I want to keep robots and surveillance cars out of my life, and my environment. but that is already not working out, as people are perfectly comfortable with their cars recording all their neighborhood.

In your deus ex scenario who makes the augments? A mega corporation. So yes they will absolutely be vilified because they won’t be for the good of humanity they’ll be to charge a subscription for… vision, and spy on everyone you know.

Only way they should be accepted is as legit medical devices with open sources and no ability to stream or record video only pipe directly into the optic nerve. They should not be for tech bro fantasies.

Will they be made by a company with a history of mining your data and ignoring your privacy, with the capability to clandestinely record people?
If so, then yeah, as they should be.

If not, then they should be fine.

I think you’re fundamentally (willfully?) misunderstanding the problem that people have with meta glasses. The problem isn’t just that they have cameras in them.

If a frog had wings would it bump it’s ass when it hopped? That’s about as relevant as this question.

Smartglasses were not “vilified”, they were already vile to begin with. They were just put on the list of vile things it’s socially acceptable to complain about.

is it possible that these glasses are “villified” because they’re made by an actual villain? meta does not believe people deserve privacy, and their tech is explicitly trying to mine data from people for manipulative uses in advertising, creative farming, and media manipulation.

also, optical implants may not necessarily need a “camera” to work. degenerative and genetic vision disorders are not a monolith, and oftentimes it’s about transmission of the image to the brain, not the eye itself.

So I work a secure unit where we take people’s devices for the privacy of all patients. We had to take a patient’s prescription glasses that they like, use to not fall down while walking, because they were smart glasses with audio / video recording functionality. This is just a whole extra level of #NewFearUnlocked. I cannot imagine the administrative clusterfuck this would cause.

Probably not, there seems to be actual use cases for optical implants, instead of excuses.

There aren’t going to be a whole lot of people who are going to fuck with their eyesight if they don’t have a severe eyesight handycap, which isn’t as common as Meta wants smart glasses to be.

Also, every hearing aid is a microphone, yet I’ve never heard of a case where information from hearing aids was being misused. Almost like there’s a big divide between aids for disabilities and surveillance tech.

If they’re internet connected, sure I would. It’s a matter of trust. If I can’t be around you without Zuckerberg or someone looking at me too, then I don’t want to be around you.

Short answer: No, this is not an issue. The FDA’s medical device regulations are not conducive to targeted advertising/data sharing/moving fast and breaking things. Data collected would be de-facto PHI, so it’s more liability than utility.

Meta want you to record things with the glasses to upload to Facebook. People who make DME firmware do not.

I suspect that this will get addressed by implants being able to output video except to the brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens if only to airgap the sensor from being hacked.

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

—Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson had it be ostracized.