Technology Fixing Technology, Augmented Reality Edition

Sergey Brin wearing Google Glasses at TED 2013

One of the more amusing characteristics of technological enthusiasts is their confidence that today’s brand new technology will fix the problems created by yesterday’s brand new technology.

Software programs that let you get some work done by temporarily turning off your access to emails and tweets are examples. Geoengineering describes a slew of technologies that might be able to save the planet from the slew of technologies that are destroying it.

The most recent example is the promise of Google co-founder Sergey Brin that his company’s newest product, Google Glass, will remedy the problems created by its previous product, the Android smartphone.

In a surprise talk at yesterday’s TED conference in California, Brin said that Google Glass will eliminate the need to shut out what’s going on around you in order to focus on your smartphone, a need he finds “emasculating.”

“You’re actually socially isolating yourself with your phone,” Brin told the audience, according to Wired. “I feel like it’s kind of emasculating…. You’re standing there just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.”

(The photographs from Brin’s appearance make it clear, by the way, that this once-geeky zillionaire has been working out, adding significantly to his personal masculinity profile.)

By layering data over our field of vision – “augmented reality” is what it’s called – Google Glass will free us  from the shackles of outdated technology, Brin said. He again showed an odd proclivity for phallic imagery by holding up a smartphone and declaring, “I whip this out and focus on it as though I have something very important to attend to. This [Google Glass] really takes away that excuse.…It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluded away in email or social posts.”

The last line in that quote bears repeating: “It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluded away in email or social posts.”

Members of Google’s sales staff may have cringed when they heard that, given that the company’s business still depends, for now at least, on people being immersed in computers and smartphones.

Brin added that Google Glass is a step toward the attainment of his ultimate ambition: Direct implantation of data streams into the brain.

“My vision when we started Google 15 years ago,” he said, “was that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all — the information would just come to you as you needed it. [Google Glass] is the first form factor that can deliver that vision.”

That digitally delivered information might itself be an intrusion, and that reality might not need any augmenting, are notions the technological enthusiast is not prepared to entertain.

Photo credit: TED/Flickr via Wired

Technology Fixing Technology

 

One of my many unappealing qualities is a propensity to say "I told you so!" This comes to mind because yesterday the New York Times ran an article that affirmed the conclusion of a recent essay of mine for the technology blog, Cyborgology. I hasten to add that my conclusion was hardly earth-shattering; still, it's always nice to see science weighing in on the side of common sense.

The subject of my essay (an adaptation of an earlier essay posted here) was the problem of taking effective action to stop global warming in the face of our utter dependence on the technologies that cause global warming. After describing the various forces that comprise what I call "de facto technological autonomy," I noted that some scientists, in desperation, are beginning to examine various geoengineering techniques that might be used to reverse the problem without having to radically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.  

After listing a couple of examples of the exotic techniques being contemplated, my essay came to the following conclusion:

One looks for hope where one can find it, but the problem here is obvious: Even if they did work for the purposes intended, nobody knows what the unintended results of such radical measures might be. Technological autonomy is a process that proceeds without regard to original intention.

Two weeks after that essay posted, the Times' Justin Gillis reported on two new studies in the journal Nature Climate Change, both predicting that significant complications would almost certainly arise from the deployment of geoengineering techniques. Those complications range from unpredictable disruptions of various environmental processes to uneven distribution of the effects of geoenginnering, which could be a source of new international tensions.

Gillis' article concluded as follows:  

The bottom line of these studies is that even as they dive into research questions on geoengineering, scientists are perhaps inevitably coming to the conclusion that we would be better off limiting our emissions now rather than handing future generations a mess that may not be at all easy to clean up.