Meta finds itself in its latest media firestorm with reports of people harassing others while capturing videos with AI glasses. In response, Meta says it’ll effectively de-platform its own hardware product from people tampering with the device to remove the white recording notification light. Reportedly, the company sent out cease-and-desist letters to groups offering that modification as a service.
The founder of Be My Eyes, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, expresses both anger and sadness about people using the glasses this way because he’s a member of a group with a very different use for Meta’s glasses. Tens of thousands of people who are blind or have low vision use the Meta glasses to make video calls to sighted volunteers around the world. The volunteers look through the camera on the glasses and answer questions about what they see.
“Even my wife said, don’t wear those glasses if you don’t use them. And I was like, ‘Okay.’ Two weeks ago I would never think about not wearing them,” Wiberg said. “Now I put them in my pocket and then when I need them, I take them out and put them on…I should not have to do that. That is simply wrong.”
I connected with Wiberg in Denmark using the podcasting platform Riverside to record a conversation about Be My Eyes. I recommend pairing this conversation with the recent one talking with CNET gadget expert Scott Stein in which he advised not accusing strangers of being perverts for simply wearing the glasses. The two conversations make for a deep dive into the way social norms are being changed by Meta’s glasses.
I personally stopped wearing Meta glasses in public due to their ability to make others uncomfortable. During the conversation with Wiberg I shared the fact that, when I did wear them, I very quickly started practicing a new bit of social etiquette by placing them on the top of my head when entering a public restroom. Wiberg suggests similar etiquette would apply to blind people facing the need for a public restroom. Simply asking someone there for assistance or feeling the way around the room should be the standard, he says.
The example highlights a difficult reality about computerized glasses. There’s a future where a locally running AI assistant can successfully answer the request “help me find the restroom” with zero Internet access. In such a scenario would a white light be needed at all when locally analyzing what’s seen by the glasses’ sensors against the device’s training, successfully directing a person step by step to a urinal or toilet without the Internet? Such an automated use would be very similar to the simple sensors already present in the bathroom for identifying when someone puts their hands under a faucet or automatically flushing a toilet when they leave the stall.
What I’m highlighting here is one of the reasons I lost interest in Meta’s glasses. Meta changed the entire product category from being centered on the cameras to being centered on artificial intelligence. Instead of personally taking photos and videos of my walks through Central Park, I had the feeling of capturing imagery to train Meta’s AI. Once AI is trained properly, there may be a future where these kinds of camera glasses don’t allow users to capture videos and photos at all to avoid any misuse by individuals, while simultaneously allowing uses like the path to the bathroom provided through offline automation.
In this hypothetical future, when automation takes the place of an interaction between two people grounded in empathy, what do humans lose?
“I have never done anything wrong and I have no intentions of doing something wrong. Of course, also blind people can do stupid stuff,” Wiberg says. “That’s not what I’m saying. But at least we have a very good reason to use those glasses to understand our surroundings and we should never think twice about putting those glasses on. But I totally understand why people don’t want to be approached by people who maybe don’t even know what a white cane is, or anything like that, and just see the glasses and say, hey, ‘what are you doing?’”
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