With how society has reacted to the meta glasses, it has me wondering about optical implants. They’re going to be here eventually, and presumably will have cameras in them out of necessity. I’m sure there will be a whole thing about getting ones that aren’t back doored by a corp, but we are also talking about curing blindness. This isn’t something everyone will skip on due to a fear of surveillance, simply because blindness can be so difficult to live with.
Are we careening towards a deus ex scenario where the majority of humanity villifies and ostracizes anyone with augments? I always expected that to a certain degree, religious folks especially being what they are, but the reaction to smart glasses has me concerned that the discrimination against people with optical implants might be way more extreme than I expected, from groups of people I would have previously considered level headed when it comes to technological advancements.
Anyway, I was just curious to hear from others what their thoughts might be on the subject. Do those of you that despise smart glasses think you’ll have the same moral issues with optical implants? What could be done to avoid the issues you have with the glasses when it comes to implants, if anything? Do you intend to discriminate against people with augments if you live long enough to see them in widespread use?
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.
The glasses are vilified as much by the use case. Google Glass was hated about just as much and the reason was because the user was recording video when people didn’t want to be recorded. People trusted that the video wasn’t going to Google, they just didn’t trust the users pointing a camera at all times.
I suspect optical implants will address this by never building in the ability to record.