Augmented Technology Wants to Hide in Order to Dominate | The American Spectator

If a pair of glasses could film your life and provide private personal commentary on your daily routines, would you wear them? 

Today, that’s a real option. 

Even though it was technically a bust, Apple launched Apple Vision Pro, one of the most blatant attempts to “augment” life with technology. We haven’t even gotten to the recent machinations of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Earlier this year, Meta released a Super Bowl ad with Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt advertising its new AI glasses. In the ad, Pratt quizzically observes a banana taped to a wall in a museum of modern art and asks his glasses what in the world he’s looking at. Meta AI happily acquiesces.

Even more bizarre, though, are the Waves glasses, which can apparently film in “stealth mode” and are being targeted toward digital content creators. The Waves commercial depicts a young man filming a pool party through his glasses, showing how he’s able to apparently be fully present in the moment while simultaneously recording the experience for future use. That, I submit, represents the new goal of digital technology. 

In the past, technological devices like the home computer were tucked away in an office or bedroom, somewhat out of sight, out of mind. You had to physically put yourself in front of it to engage with it, and it was relatively closed off from the rest of life. No one lugged their computers to Starbucks to write emails. Car phones stayed in the cars.

Enter the mobile phone, the laptop, the iPod, and on down the line, until you arrive at the world of augmented technology; these are the devices that go with you places and which have become ever more central to our daily lives.

Of course, I’m thinking of the iPhone in particular, but also about the Apple Watch, which not only tells time, but can monitor stress levels, heart rate, daily steps, etc. Neuralink, Elon Musk’s tech company aiming to make successful brain implants, is trying to totally dissolve the distance between the human mind and mediating technologies. The social critic Christine Rosen has written about this at length in her book The Extinction of Experience. Far from enhancing our lives and enlivening our experiences in the world, digital technology tends to blunt our perceptions, distract us from the present moment, and diminish our enjoyment of everyday life. We’ve handed ourselves over to technology and are surprised to find out we’ve lost our minds in the process.

The boundaries between the physical and digital are only getting fuzzier, and technology’s invasion is getting subtler and yet more aggressive at the same time. A device like a pair of Meta glasses wants to be a ghost, hardly noticeable, and yet it filters the entirety of your experiences. It wants to disguise itself as an ordinary object and yet serve as a mediating buffer between your brain and the world. It wants to hide so that it can dominate. Privacy and legal concerns aside, this has become what technology is all about: Totally invading our lives by turning almost invisible, controlling how we see the world while convincing us we’re the ones truly seeing it. Mediating technology, from ChatGPT to Meta to Waves, are the new interpreters of reality. And we seem more than happy to give it that place in our lives.

I am not a philosopher, much less an expert on consciousness or phenomenology, but I’m curious about how this kind of approach to technology handicaps our ability to be purveyors and reflectors of our own experience. In his article “Reading Ourselves to Death,” Kit Wilson describes how our media ecosystem is so bogged down with mediation that it’s hard to go about our day without using our little information computers as lenses through which we interpret the world. Without an explanatory narrative, we feel lost. Wilson writes:

Simply watching the world go by, observing and reflecting on it, is too shapeless an experience. I want the world narrated, to have clear, meaningful sentences fed to me. When we talk about being addicted to our phones, isn’t this craving for text a big part of it?

AI assistants, now literally attached to our bodies, will offer this stream of verbiage on command. They will offer us a constantly narrated world, one where our own minds no longer have to work to engage with things as they present themselves. We will never have to think for ourselves again. That might be convenient, comforting, or entertaining, but offloading our minds to a machine in the name of augmented living won’t count for much if we lose the textures of experience. Those experiences, and our responses to them, make up the painful, beautiful, and worthwhile stories of our lives.

Peter Biles, a Young Voices contributor, is a novelist and culture writer from Oklahoma. His latest book is a short story collection called Last November.