As egregious as this is, it still doesn't strike me as nakedly insulting as Google's refusal to let you turn on the (entirely passive!) GPS receiver on your phone without uploading your precise location to their servers, for similar data collection purposes.
I'd love to see this sort of thing be made illegal, but the only regulatory domain with an Overton window even close to that is the EU, and it's such a minefield of potential gray areas that I doubt it would get off the ground even there.
You must have missed the part where they created a synthetic dataset of 100000 environments, trained the network on that, and released it to the public?
Not saying I’m not worried about their plans too, but that is clearly addressed in the text.
* How uncomfortable the headsets are to wear for long periods if time
* How useless they are (what are they solution for?)
* How ridiculous they look
* How expensive they are
* How expensive it is to produce content for
After they solve these issues then I will worry about the dystopia we are in. VR headsets may look cool and futuristic in the movies but in reality they are just screens you wear on your head and that's it.
And they won't be useless! That's the worst part. They will provide compelling value, like smartphones, and as such will be impossible to boycott. At first the value will be simple, obvious utility, like route overlays. Later it will be value within the system, much like how the main utility of smartphones now is to run the mandatory apps to participate in aspects of society that previously did not require a smartphone. And of course they will be addictive.
Here is a short sci-fi film depicting what I fear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
Now as far as making them more useful I suppose *if* they can solve that first problem plus make them match the form of IMAX glasses (preferably smaller). Then yes they could be useful (providing there's good enough applications).
But don't cause the user to get sick feature is not 'a nice to have' you can't expect it to spread like the smartphone if people can't use it for long periods of time.
Will Meta solve that problem? Doubtful. Will they provide good enough applications to make AR worth using once they do? I wouldn't bet on it.
Just because a company has an incentive for something to be successful doesn't mean they can pull off. Just look at metaverse.
That made my day. I do agree, it is creepy but its what theyre pushing.
Wait, Snowcrash was horror for you? I thought the whole point of post-cyberpunk was to not assume all tech would be dystopian.
> That understanding would let AR glasses tailor content to you and your individual context, like seamlessly blending a digital overlay with your physical space
Horrifying, if it ever takes off in the way that "Meta" wants it to. Take the modern smartphone disease and amplify it a few orders of magnitude.
> While LLMs rely on vast amounts of training data that typically comes from a range of publicly available text sources on the web, no such repository of information yet exists for physical spaces at the scale needed for training an end-to-end model.
Considering the tremendous scale in question, the "yet" is also terrifying. The only way to collect such a dataset would be if some large fraction of people were wearing always-on, network connected cameras. Meta clearly sees this future and wants it; the kind of future where everyone wears a Meta headset, all the time, and has their experience of reality mediated through it - optimized to maximize shareholder value of course, under the watchful eye of The Algorithm. A panopticon AI shoggoth.
Meta is an AI paperclip maximizer, and it is getting uncomfortably close to the "RELEASE THE HYPNODRONES" stage.