The Facial Computer

Artificial Intelligence, Eyewear, and the Contest to Own Everything You Look At

De: Richard Murch

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The Facial Computer is upon us – and there are many different varieties to now choose from.

But is it good? Will it work and persist?

This book will show you how ---- so read on

An optometrist and a computer scientist, writing jointly, set out why the most consequential computing platform of the decade arrived disguised as a pair of sunglasses, and why almost nobody saw it coming.

The argument of this book is not that these devices should not exist. It is that the question of what they become is still open, that it is being answered by default rather than by decision, and that the people who will bear most of the cost — the bystanders, who are not customers, who have no interface, and who appear in no consent record — have no voice in the process at all.

There is a pattern in the history of head-worn computing, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Every previous attempt failed for the same reason: the computer was the point.

The device announced itself. It sat on the face as a declaration, and everyone who looked at the wearer was obliged to have an opinion about

A camera in a spectacle hinge dissolves that equilibrium entirely. There is no posture. There is no raised arm, no oriented rectangle, no pause in the wearer’s gait.

The wearer looks at you, which is the single most ordinary thing a human being can do, and the looking is the recording. The gesture that signals capture and the gesture that signals nothing at all have become the same gesture.

This is why the standard reassurance — that these devices do nothing a phone cannot already do — misses the point so completely. The capability is broadly similar. The observability is not. And observability, not capability, is what our norms were built on.