Meta’s Smart Glasses Might Make You Smarter. They’ll Certainly Make You More Awkward

On an earnings telephone this summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an eager claim astir nan early of smart glasses, saying he believes that someday group who don’t deterioration AI-enabled smart spectacles (ideally his) will find themselves astatine a “pretty important cognitive disadvantage” compared to their smart-glasses-clad kin.

Meta’s astir caller effort to show nan humanity-enhancing capabilities of its look computing level didn’t do a very bully occupation of bolstering that argument.

In a unrecorded keynote reside astatine nan company’s Connect developer convention connected Wednesday, Zuckerberg tossed to a merchandise demo of nan new smart glasses he had conscionable announced. That demo instantly went awry. When a cook was brought onstage to inquire nan Meta glasses’ sound adjunct to locomotion him done a recipe, he said nan “Hey Meta” aftermath word, and each brace of Meta glasses successful nan room—hundreds, since nan glasses had conscionable been distributed to nan crowd of attendees—sprang to life and started chattering.

In an Instagram Reel posted aft nan event, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth (whose ain spot onstage had tally into method problems) said nan hiccup happened because truthful galore instances of Meta's AI moving successful nan aforesaid spot meant they had inadvertently DDOS’d themselves. But a video telephone demo grounded too, and nan demos that did activity were filled pinch lags and interruptions.

This isn’t meant to conscionable beryllium a dunk astatine nan kludgy Connect keynote. (We emotion a unrecorded demo, truly!) But nan weirdness, nan timid exchanges, nan repeated commands, and nan woody conversations inadvertently bespeak conscionable really graceless this exertion tin beryllium erstwhile utilized successful nan existent world.

“The main problem for maine is nan earthy magnitude of times wherever you do prosecute pinch an AI adjunct and inquire it to do thing and it doesn't really understand,” says Leo Gebbie, a head and expert astatine CCS Insights. “The nonaccomplishment consequence conscionable is high, and nan spread is still beautiful large betwixt what's being shown and what we're really going to get.”

Eyes of nan World

Clearly, we are a agelong measurement from Zuckerberg’s imagination of smart glasses being nan computing level that elevates humanity to immoderate higher-thinking, higher-functioning state. Sure, wearing internet-connected hardware connected your look tin make it easier and faster to entree information, and that whitethorn thief you become—or astatine slightest look to become—smarter aliases much capable. But arsenic nan clumsiness of nan Connect demo very publically demonstrated, nan enactment of simply wearing a chatbot and a surface connected your look mightiness cancel retired immoderate cognitive advantage. Smart glasses put nan wearer astatine a important social disadvantage.