@Jason Bloomberg Re: something like glass has its applications
Movies portraying VR/AR in science fiction rarely, if ever, touched on the invasive corporate monitoring aspects of it, or if they did, they did so only the the most abstract sense. This is why the applications of face-recognition and metadata correlation seem to have taken everyone by surprise. It is this aspect, this misuse of the technology and not the technology itself, that brought about the global hostility to Glass.
It's not just that Glass was a wearable semi-hidden camera; it was the face-recognition software behind the camera and the fact of Google tracking everyone though it that was the main driver of opposition against it. Had corporations like Google NOT pursued this "we want to spy on everything you do so we can discover all your psychological weaknesses and exploit them for profit" mentality, had the Glass device used only local storage and allowed the user to control what data went where, I believe there would not have been such a hostile reaction.
Nobody likes to be spied on, no matter how noble the intentions of those doing the spying might be. Nobody likes to have their weaknesses probed so they can be more easily manipulated, especially when those doing the manipulating are solely interested in milking you for as much money as they can squeeze out of you. That's exactly what the marketing industry is all about - finding ways to bypass conscious decision-making processes in order to make people want to buy something.
And then there's the intelligence and police agencies, all scrambling for the delicious absolute surveillance and control this technology imposes, who are ostensibly there to protect us, but from what? They are there to enforce the laws, and that is all, and with the laws being less and less about mandating civilised behaviour and more and more about protecting the rich and increasing corporate profits at the expense of every other liberty we hold dear, who are those agencies really fighting for? Not our freedom, that's for sure. Not for a long time.
Everyone knows this, subconsciously if not consciously, and that is why any such technology will now be vigorously opposed no matter what form it takes. The technological utopias imagined by sci-fi authors aren't going to happen, not now, not ever. Corporate greed and intelligence-agency megalomania have seen to that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
