Smart glasses — a new frontier of foreseeable digital harm?

ABC. This podcast contains audio advertising. To hear it without ads, head to the ABC Listen app now. ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. I'm David Mar, host of Late Nightlord on Radio National, where nothing's off limits. You know, part of being an adult is dealing with discomfort. We gather the sharpest minds around to hash over what's shaping this crazy world. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party succumbed to big money. Late Night Live, four new shows a week on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to another edition of The Mindfield, where we try to, I don't know, what we try to do anymore of almost run out. But we're struggling because the world is just taking off at a pace that is very difficult to match. We're going to do our best to get air arms around it. Well, they'd all use minehames. Scott Stevens is my bewildered co-host, hella scoped. bewildered is exactly right. I do have a proposal for you, though. I mean, we're basically going with the same tagline that we've used for, you know, 12 years, you know, what does it navigate the moral whatever of modern life. Even though I pledge routinely to say something else, I never quite get around to it. I mean, I do think that what we're actually trying to do is to make the familiar strange. To, yes. And the strange familiar. Okay. So, one of the ideas that I've long thought we need to do is to unearth some of those fascinating but failed prophecies, those predictions of what is going to come, what will follow if we only can do X? Can I, so do you mean, for example, those endless predictions about how every technological breakthrough remains we're only going to work for 10 minutes today? All right. Is that the kind of thing you're after? So, for instance, consider John Maynard Keynes' wonderful, wonderful, as say, the economic possibilities of our grandchildren, where, you know, as a result of what he called the miracle of compound interest. You know, nothing more spectacular than the idea of savings rolling over in a growing interest on its own. We will be able to shorten the word week to, you know, maximum of two, three days. Just imagine how much opportunity for inner betterment, for the deepening of the soul, for the expansion of the mind, for the refinement of our aesthetic capabilities, that all that leisure time will give us. We'll finally be able to turn human life to that, which is most valuable and enriching to human life. And instead, what we have seen repeatedly, to some extent, we kind of explored this a bit a few weeks ago with Melanie White, didn't we? That what periods of prosperity, of convenience, what technological breakthroughs, what, you know, unheard of forms of wealth and economic betterment have done, is almost to lure us into a condition of unthinkingness about what we are doing with the time that has been afforded us. And it seems to me that one of the things that we try to do repeatedly is to take those things that we use or do unthinkingly, unreflectively and try to maybe turn them over and expose the grubs and the caterpillars and the other things that are just scrambling underneath. Are you really sure that these are the kinds of things that you want cultivating, that you want growing underneath these overarching conditions of prosperity and convenience? It seems to me that that's kind of what we're doing at today's episode. Okay. I had honestly not even thought that we would do a show about this before, but as soon as you suggested I was like, yes, this is exactly right. Because it's exactly the kind of thing that I think manifests so much of our unthinkingness when it comes to technology. Now, to be fair, I think we're getting a little bit better at thinking about technology as we get more and more scared of it, AI being the classic example. The teen social media then, being perhaps, I actually think in political and social terms it might be a bit of a watershed moment where it's probably the first time we have as a demos and then obviously consequently as a polity started trying to think about policy on the basis that technology may not always be an alloyed good. There might be times we actually want politics to step in and protect us from technology rather than just let us ride it. So I think that was a bit of a watershed. We'll see whether or not that prediction is true and maybe that's the subject of a future episode. But we'll eat evening you saying that. And I think you're right. But it also exposes a paradox that is at the heart of the emergence of the uptake of and our retroactive attempts to belatedly govern or legislate the technologies that we unleash upon the world. And that's the technology rushes ahead, not just of culture but also of legislation. And we don't often really know, I mean there are certain things that are anticipating aren't there. There are certain things that, wow, that was never going to be a good idea. But some of these forms of technology that we think, you know, that could just be really convenient. That could streamline my work life. Once you unleash them on large numbers of people at scale with the promise of constant upgrades and of new adaptations and of new expressions, you don't often really realize the full extent of the harms that are at play until they've been unleashed, until they've escaped the lab. If we can put it that way. Yeah, which is one of the reasons I have for at the very least, what, 15, 16 years, lamented the death. And I think it is an hour of pretty comprehensive death of conservatism as a serious political philosophy that operates in that way as opposed to operating in a partisan or, you know, sort of affective way. So a rigorous kind of conservatism, because that's all about talking about unanticipated consequences, unintended consequences of what gets lost as we do things, as we rush headlong into things. That's long gone. And I diagnosed that a long time ago with the, at the risk of repeating myself as being a consequence of conservative political parties embracing probably the last, you know, radical or revolutionary ideology of the 20th century, which was neoliberalism. So that's, you know, conservatism was gone. And as a result of that, we were in a world that was just endlessly and unreflectively progressive. Let's just jump in, jump into things. The thing that has alarmed me about the way that we've responded to technology in this way, this sort of horse having bolted dynamic that you described, is, you know, not just that we don't think about the unintended consequences, but that the gains that are on offer seem to be so slight. Like, it takes nothing for us to go, yeah, let's just do that. A little bit of convenience, that's all. And then we will surrender our very notions of privacy or hand over, swathes of data that are so comprehensive that they allow for large-scale manipulation by nefarious actors or whatever it is. And then we sort of enlist a more migration of our lives online that makes us vulnerable to hacking, for example, in ways that we then wake up later and go, oh, wow, hang on. Now, it was this thing I heard recently about North Korean agents now being able to hack into Australian companies and access all their data because they hack their way into getting employed and then getting in the systems as all these sorts of things. It's the lightness with which we adopt these things that kind of scares me. Or, but it's also a feature of the technologies themselves to insinuate their way into so many aspects of life that not just the initial friction, the clumsiness of uptake is overcome. Yeah. But also, very quickly, after using something that may only offer in the initial stages a mild, say, addition of convenience, very quickly becomes, I actually can't quite imagine going on with my daily life without this particular new, if you just think about, I mean, it wasn't that long. Yeah, it becomes indispensable very quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I was still using refidexes. I swear to God. Wow. It's a small wonder that I've never had a traffic accident. And now, and now, things like geolocation is just, it's unimaginable to find ones way around without certain forms of, so it seems to me that this, we should point out though, if you're not in Brisbane, a refidex is a street directory. It's like a sit-away or a melee or a good station. What was the other one? Was it a UPD? Was that one? A UPD. Anyway, a street directory. A street directory. Almost impossible to use. Yeah. It wasn't amazing when you, the road that you followed happened to go into the corner. And so you had to pay attention to the page number that you connected to that was in the corner, not down the bottom or on the side. And that could really throw you off if you didn't pay it. Anyway. One of the things that technologies have been seeking to do, it seems to me for a very long time, is to break down that barrier, to break down the wall between ones life lived virtually or ones life lived online and ones life lived actually or really or in the social world, in the material world. And it seems to me that one of the final ways that we've seen that wall be broken through is through the advent of? No, the advent was a little while ago. But now we're seeing a widespread commercial uptake in the use of smart glasses. Yeah, which terrifies me. Oh, well, on every conceivable level, I cannot but see this as a terrible, terrible idea, not just because of the implications that it has for surveillance, for data collection, for the rapid increase in the amount of biometric information that can then be harvested, used, sent back for the training of large language models, for the military and law enforcement, potential applications. I mean, these are all things that are kind of right on the edges, perhaps, of some of the concerns we're going to address today. The implications that it has for privacy, in other words, not just for the users themselves, but also for those who are being viewed, those who are within the circumference of visibility. I mean, the involuntarily conscripted into this as well. Thank you. But then I think we'll aid the effect that it has, that it could potentially have on the moral lives, or the moral capabilities of the where is themselves. On every level at the political, technological military, at the level of security, of surveillance, of safety, of privacy, the new opportunities that it opens up for stalking and harassing behavior, and then what it does to the fundamental faculty of, let's call it moral attentiveness. On every level, I see this as radically, radically concerning. And I feel like I'm standing here in the corner. It's not that other people aren't raising these concerns. God knows they are. But I feel like I'm standing here in the corner wondering, why is nobody else as terrified at the prospect of the widespread uptake of smart glasses? Because not everyone else, so the two old Muppets, there we are. Yes. But, say more about this. What did you say, attentiveness? All right. Why is this compromising attentiveness? All right. All right. So I'm going to leave some of the other things to you and to our guest. I'm just quite sure that nobody else in the world is going to articulate things in quite these terms, which says far worse things about me than. So it all goes back to Pokemon Go. Yep. Which we did a show on at the time. So remember, what Pokemon Go? This is out. Sort of up with the technology we are. One of the things that Pokemon Go did, is it almost virtually mapped a kind of digital world on the reality of landmarks and locations all around us. So people, if you remember, good heavens. People would go to actual locations because there was the opportunity to catch certain virtual or digital Pokemon that happened to be there, which you could then only access into face catch, so on, with the app. And it did this strange thing. Is it suddenly turned the real world, the actual world, the shared world into a kind of digital playground by means of an overlay where, yes, you are in the real world with other real people, but the reason you were there is by interacting primarily with the fundamental object of your interest or attention, which was a digital thing. And the concern that I raised at the time is what does technology do to us when it interposes itself between us and real actual other people? When the opportunities for-- no, I don't think there are many radically unmediated interactions that we have with people. There are all sorts of things that interpose themselves that mediate in between us and other moral agents, the moral realities of other persons. But when forms of technology interpose themselves, I think there's something else. There's something additional and something quite dangerous that's going on. So take a fundamental moral encounter between two human beings, where I assume that we're face to face. I assume that what's brought us together is some matter of common concern. This may be a domestic matter, something around the house, something involving our shared life. This may be a social or a political matter. Either way, I am facing. I am required at a particular moment to be attentive to the moral reality, to the concerns, to perhaps hopefully the shared concerns of another human being. And you know what it's like, well, you know what it's like when you're speaking to another person, and you can just feel almost imperceptibly but not quite. You can feel their attention begin to wane. You can see that maybe behind your shoulder, someone else had just walked in the room that they find more interesting than you. This probably doesn't happen to you. It happens to me all the time. And you just see that little moment where their eye begins to drift elsewhere. And you know that at this moment, whatever it is I may have been saying, there's not that point of moral linguistic rhetorical connection. It's that little moment that can cause these strides. When it happens in a significant relationship or in our marriage, you can feel it. It can cause that little short circuit. You've lost something. There's been an unspoken betrayal in what it is that is demanded of me at this moment. And now imagine that the person you're speaking to is wearing a pair of smart glasses. And now imagine that as you're speaking with them, some notification has just come up on in their right lens. That's told them that they've got an email that they need to attend to. Or that this is the latest American involvement in Iran or whatever. So it turns the whole world into a phone screen effectively. That feeling that you have when you're looking at your phone, you're sure that maybe you're an exception to this. But you pick up your phone for one purpose and then you get so distracted by all the notifications or whatever that you've either got or that come in in the meantime that you forget what the original purpose was and you find that you put your phone down without attending to that email or that text or whatever that you were planning on doing. That level of perpetual distraction and of the reduction of the real world into just another avatar. Exactly right. Yeah, which is why one of the first things that I did two and a half years ago when the full extent of the implications of the interposition of technology onto our relations with other people was to turn off absolutely all of my notifications. I need to go looking, which it means I sometimes miss something, but it seems to me that it's a price worth paying. That's explaining so much of our interaction. So, so, if you were speaking with somebody and in the middle of a serious conversation, a conversation that was in some way demanding, they just looked down at their phone. That's not a social faux pas. That is a betrayal of what is required of me in these circumstances, in what this conversation requires of us. The whole problem with smart glasses is that everything that's taking place from the filming, the surveillance, the facial recognition, the directing you towards certain things, the interposition, the possibility of advertising, the possibilities of influencing where I'm going rather than just enabling where I'm going, all of these things. And then the further issue of the possibility of notifications, interspersing, interposing themselves between you and another person, all of these things are happening covertly. All of these things are happening imperceptibly. And so all you're left with then are these little indications that we usually associate with this person's lost interest in me. This person's attention has just begun to wane. Those are the things that we're going to be seeing more and more as the eye just flicks up and over diagonally to the right. It seems to me that when what one is primarily, and here I just mean first, the first thing in one's field of vision is digital. And the primacy of one's interaction is transposed onto the digital instead of the moral relational political, social. Already there, this is a recipe for the substitution of the requirement or the discipline of moral attentiveness and its transformation into mere attention. So could we simplify this by saying, when you are dealing with technology that by its nature is, either let's call it immersive or let's call it integrated. So it integrates the real world to the digital world. That actually what inevitably happens is a certain displacement of the real world. It's not enhancement. This is not quite the same thing even as holding up an augmented reality app that translates a sign in a foreign language when you're overseas to tell you what it says. This is, I mean, and you can have a whole conversation about that anyway, but it's more than that, that it transforms the very nature of the real world in which you're interacting and that there is something, if we value the real world, and we value the nature of real world human interactions, or just the human interaction with the real world, then something really deep is being lost there. If you accept that as sort of an accurate paraphrasing or a workable paraphrasing. Well, I mean, partly, but I guess the one thing that I would add into that is, you know, what is required in interpersonal relationships, something that is required is tact, is the ability to, as we sometimes call it, read the room to be sensitive to and attentive to what one is experiencing immediately rather than having many of those things, the domain. hands that need to be somehow navigated rather than having a shortcut introduced by means of a digital overlay. OK, so I have two observations I want to make here. I'm interested in your response to this. By the way, if you've just joined us, you are listening to the Mindfield on ABC Radio National. We'll eat Ali, my name's Scott Stevens, my co-host. I have two things I'd like to get your response to on that. One is, I'm interested in the dynamic effect. So if this becomes how we relate to one another, then in some ways acting like that becomes less of a betrayal. I will confess, I'm still really bothered when I'm spending time with someone and they're looking at their phone more than they're looking at me, but I'm less bothered by them picking up their phone to check a message or just looking at their phone periodically for whatever reason than I perhaps was five years ago, ten years ago, if thing. So in other words, we've become in you into this and maybe what happens is a kind of normary writing, which means that a lot of your concerns then become ameliorated in some way. I'm interested in your thoughts on that. What do you make of the fact that the uptake of this seems to have been relatively slow? Look, I remember the first time I heard about these and maybe it's just cost, but the first moment about these, I had the same reaction as you, perhaps not as fully theorized, but the same sort of reflective horror. And I know very few people who have them. I think I can think of one friend who has them immediately as a kind of person who's just always been into whatever the latest technology is ever since we were kids. No, that doesn't surprise me. But I don't know anyone else. I don't really have any stories of social interactions where this has kind of happened. In other words, this has been around for a while, but not really taken over our lives. And I remember all the moral panicking over second life stuff and whatever the meta version of that is more recently. And all these sorts of things. I wonder if this is not being taken up at the levels that would cause alarm in the ways that you've raised. And if not, that that might actually speak to the truth of your concerns. That by displacing something that is so elemental and so essential to human life, maybe, maybe it's actually placed a ceiling on a turn uptake. The whole norm breaking thing, I just think there is something different, well, about the kinds of convention and mutual consideration that have grown up around. I'm still listening. I just have to check my phone quickly. On the understanding that we never quite leave work, do we? We never quite. These aren't simply discretionary phone checks. I'm not checking a score update. Except they probably are. But this is maybe one of the norms. So these new forms of mutual consideration and excuse seeking. I'm listening. Please don't worry. I just need to check it could be my kids or whatever. So there are certain forms of politeness and deference that I think have grown up around that. That's not the same, I think, as the, I mean, you know, the diagnosis of the uncanny valley. Yeah. It's almost our world, but not quite. And it's in the not quite where the horrors live. When someone is almost looking at you, but not quite. Yeah. That's where I think the real moral dangers live. So let me just maybe leave that to the side for just one moment. I was with you about the slow uptake. And you know, there was something about the sort of the price prohibitive it is about some of the clunkiness in the technology itself. People complaining of, you know, recurrent headaches, really restricted uses to some of the augmented or virtual reality headsets. That just also says to become cool. OK, but there has really been a change in the last 18 months. Really? Yeah. And this is what, for me, at least has provided a degree of urgency. Sort of more early, maybe, in the sudden spike in uptake than after it's become fully developed. Two of the things that have happened, it seems to me. And our guest hopefully can correct me on this if I'm wrong. One is the sheer tonnage of money that a company like Meta has poured into augmented reality. Or into smart glasses. There is something here which has become a not just a technological but also a commercial imperative. We can get to the imperative behind in just a moment. And next comes the partnership between companies like Meta and then other fashion labels, especially fashion labels in glasses. I don't want it, you know, it's the ABC. I don't want to name them. But like really, really fashionable. And so suddenly you have, they no longer, you can still kind of tell that they're smart glasses. But at a time when so many glasses that people are wearing as fashion choices are themselves quite clunky and noticeable and that sit so heavily on the face. Now the sheer size of these glasses, it no longer sticks out in quite the same way. And while they over the last five months, there really has been a significant, significant uptake precisely because of the extent to which they are being integrated with certain functionalities on one's phones. So this is one of the new ways that I can interact with programs, with platforms that have already insinuated themselves into many of the ways that I live. And then you have in addition to that, there's a certain amount of hype surrounding them that may well not be realized. But there is also a clear commercial interest in there being large uptake because the great of the uptake, the more data that's being collected, the more utility, the more utility is being gained for the real interest, it seems to me in the uptake and smart glasses. So sorry. Are you telling me that I'm in an unusual social circle because I don't encounter people with these glasses or are you telling me that I am encountering them and I just don't realize? It may well be a little bit of both. One thing that is clear is that there were real concerns two and a half years ago about commercial inviability. Those concerns over the last eight months have almost entirely evaporated. You're listening to The Mindfield on ABC Radio National. Well, that's Ali's, my name is Scott Stevens. He's my fretting co-host. We have a guest who I don't know if he'll help us fret or calm us down. I don't actually know if this is part of the excitement of welcoming our guest. Who's going to be? Our guest, thankfully, because I'll admit I'm weird and the things that concern me don't necessarily concern other people. Our guest is certainly going to help us flesh out some of the concerns and maybe part of our responses that we really haven't engaged with yet. Militze Stilovic is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney where she's working on an ARC funded project called governing immersive technology. Millie, thank you so much for joining us on The Mindfield. Hello, it's wonderful to be here. That was such a great intro and there is so much to unpack here. But Scott, I will begin with seeing your distraction and raising you with adjudication and sanitation of the human experience via smart glasses and the integration of AI into smart glasses. So when we're looking at smart glasses and just that kind of, okay, we're getting distracted, we see notifications, etc, etc. What about those moments when you are interacting with someone and they're telling you something that could be of interest, something that you don't know and you have an AI voice already preempting your address or your answer to that particular statement. What then happens to human interaction? Is that then sanitizing the interaction to what is pleasant to what is correct or is it allowing the human experience to be messy and creative in the same way Dionysius falls out of the cliff and into wine and fire? Okay, we don't necessarily need to fall into the fire to understand this. But what happens then when AI is completely influencing every mode of conversation, every mode of interaction, every mode of human experience and we can do that via smart glasses? So sorry, Millie, I've been very partial in my description of what it is that smart glasses actually do. The features that they, we don't want to advert. But what are the capabilities that are being promised? What is it that might be encouraging the commercial outtake? Okay, so the low down on smart glasses, as we know, they're basically wearable phones for your face. You will have the capacity to video or to record. You will have the capacity in later editions to be able to read your emails, to be able to navigate, to be able to translate conversations in different countries or read menus in different languages. And importantly, you will have this AI assist who will then be able to, for example, if you're cooking something for dinner and you don't want to be flicking through recipes, you will be able to ask, how long do I have to put in these roast potatoes in the oven at 200? And this AI assist will help. So it's this kind of virtual companion and rather than looking down to a screen, we're simply looking through the lens into this augmented world. Which means that potentially there's no field of life that it couldn't penetrate. Maybe something so deeply physical that was being possible to wear glasses doing it or something like that. But that's really it. Perhaps. I mean, it's being sold to us as this enrichment of the human existence in productivity in some form of enhancement. And yet we're not asking these tech companies what do you mean by productivity and at what cost? What is productivity to you? Is it that 5% increase of output? Are you ushering in an era of style and style worker? We're all going to be wearing smart glasses and working faster and harder. Or is it some form of enrichment that we're going to have some creature comforts again to have that AI companion with us so that we don't start a when we're conversing or that we're able to understand different languages. But this is, I think this brings me back to the point I made towards the start, which is about just how small we are selling these things. How small the prices that we're selling these things for. So your example of the recipe, I don't know, I reckon a huge chunk of the audience heard that and went, actually, that sounds great. And I know that wasn't your intention in sharing that example. It's a lot. But I think that's actually what would have happened. And I think then people immediately will get the productivity element of it. They might not be thinking about it in a workplace context. But already that's showing up in AI. I mean, people who are using AI for their jobs and I imagine the huge numbers of people doing that even as they know that is probably hastening their redundancy. They do it because they know that it allows them to get through their work. We go or get through more work and therefore I really get a promotion or whatever at my pay. I had a horrible workshop at universities recently talking about people who were churning out unbelievable numbers of publications in a year because they were simply using AI to do it. And the problem then becomes, well, if you don't do that then you're now underperforming. That becomes the new path. There's a kind of performance inflation that goes on. So people already, in a sense, embracing that will be prepared at least to wear it. But you're telling me I can cook quicker? You're telling me I can access a recipe more quickly or perhaps even more than that. More quickly be able to find that thing that I want to order so I still live it to me. Okay. I'll take you out of the realm of convenience and bring you back into Armageddon land. Sorry. My point of Harley, Militzer, is our capacity to buy Armageddon for the sake of small time convenience in the here and now is extraordinary. It is not something I'd anticipated was quite as extreme as it was in human nature. That said, articulate Armageddon, please. Okay. So for example, we're baking potatoes that are five percent quicker time. What are you actually giving for that convenience? What have we thought about, for example, we're offering AI, which is embedded in this smart glasses technology, an entire layout of our kitchen, our preferences, where we're shopping, what we're actually eating, what time we're eating, all these things that these large learning models are dependent on and this might seem small scale. But if we raise the stakes a little bit, you were talking about, for example, scholarly output, which is terrifying to me because I feel that AI still does not have the capabilities to think critically and that one of those things is a marker of intelligence. And as a deputy editor-in-chief of an academic journal, you can spot chat GBT. Yes, you can. You can. Yeah. You know about a spot all of them though. No, that's why we have experts in the field though. I still think that we are at the cusp of simply adopting technologies for the sake of adopting technologies because they're being sold to us through this kind of convenience. But we're not asking the right questions of great, so why do I need smart glasses? Okay, I'm not going to be looking down at my phone. What am I giving you back for the convenience of looking up or looking through? And there are some instances where smart glasses are great and they're applied, for example, a mechanic under a car. Being able to live record something or ask in real time, okay, so how do I fix this? Sorry, maybe that's about analogy. I don't know too much about cars. But aviation technology or engineering could really be assisted through this smart glasses kind of point of view. But there are other things that are we're not getting enough to then be able to hand over parts of humanity essentially to these large language models and other tech companies that are reaping the rewards of this by giving us something new and shiny. So I fully agree with that. My observation is that we haven't been all along and we've been prepared to hand it over. We've done that with social media. We do that with the way in which we've allowed the algorithm to use us as effectively raw material that has shown up in some cases in the degradation of democracy, the manipulation of our emotions. Sometimes in a quite studied deliberate way in the case of the Facebook trial that that did when it wasn't 2014 or something. It's a long time ago. Sort of stuff was going on. At no point have we paused. Like even the social media ban that I mentioned. What's fascinating about that to me is we can find it to children because, well, that's the only harm that we're not interested in ameliorating the harm that we might be doing ourselves at all. So we can find it to that. And we don't really think about more thoroughgoing kinds of reforms or legal responses or regulation that might be to do with limiting what the algorithm can do for example or making the algorithm transparent or all these. So although the outcome of the recent civil litigation in the United States that found Facebook in particular, to have been guilty of deliberately addictive behavior. And this is for adults. This is for young adults who understand. So I mean, going back to your kind of rose colored glasses, Doug Nuss a little bit early now there are some really interesting responses that are at play that may well say, okay, these things have happened. These things have been unleashed. Now we're reckoning with the consequences. But I think your deeper point will lead is the right one. Why is it that belated reckoning with the social and personal and even moral consequences of some of these technology? Why is this not informing the way that we think about and the way that we might moderate, mediate the uptake of future technologies? Not even the court decision. What do you notice immediately about the court decision? It's not popular and it's not political. When I say it's not popular, I don't mean people don't like it. It doesn't emerge from the populace. No, that's right. So it has to be something that came from above in a kind of technocratic legal way rather than something that was genuinely reflecting a sentiment or political will. Do you see what I mean? It's only partial, do you think? Yeah, yeah. I mean, these things would not be happening. Had there not been. You know, it may be a small wave, but it certainly was a wave of popular, especially parental concern. I think we're circling around the drain of good governance of these particular technologies. And what is required is, governance has often been on the back foot. Technologies will be imposed on societies and then we have to quickly scramble to set the guardrails and to then create some sort of regulation that's going to attempt to alleviate harms. And this is coming from a lack of transparency and a lack of communication between the different facets that should be sitting at the table and talking to create governance. And that includes tech corporations who are treating technologies as this unbridled horse, as you had mentioned in the introduction, will lead, running away and saying, "Okay, let's see what we can do with this technology." Let's bring it back and say, "What have you got in mind to unleash on society and what are the impacts of this? Allow the regulators to be sitting at the table with policymakers. Allow their decisions to be informed by what academics are seeing in the field." And then actually coming up with a situation that perhaps may alleviate these kinds of harms because they're not, we're not setting precedence with the technologies that have come before, for example, smart glasses or virtual reality. There isn't a precedence. And so, again, that comes from that transparency and it begins with these tech companies who haven't been so transparent. And that's not to say they haven't attempted to do things to alleviate certain harms, but it's not enough and they often get band-aided off. That's the voice of Emilit Stilinovic, his postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney. I guess for this week's edition of The Mindfield, well, later, my name is Scott Stevens, my car host. You're listening to us on ABC Radio National. So, so, Millie, there are two things that we haven't quite touched on that I'm really interested in using teasing a part for us because it seems to me that beyond the effects on the wears, the users of smart glasses, there are two really quite concerning effects that impose themselves. tells directly on the social world. One is what the wearing of smart glasses does the whole idea of consent. So for instance, I may agree to the terms and conditions into some of the moral and social consequences by means of my purchase, but the people that I'm observing haven't. And it creates this kind of bubble, this cocoon around me, that other people may or may not be wandering into and be caught up in my vision in a way that is malicious or malignant. We can just imagine the various forms of malign uses that have and are being-- this technology is being put. So what it does to consent-- and the extent to which people around me may well not be able to find their participation in these forms of technology, escapable. There's something about that that I guess sort of rattles me. The other thing-- and you can emphasize one of the other or just could redefine it altogether-- we've talked quite a lot about what algorithms do to personalize, to bespoke one's engagement with the world. There is the very real prospect is there not if there is this rapid uptake in the use of smart glasses that the people who are walking around us are also not exactly participating in something like a shared reality. That there is a bespoke engagement with this landmark, with that business, with this particular location, such that even when we're doing that most fundamental social act of congregating, we are to crib cherry turquoise, great phrase, we are alone together. Well, let's start with consent. So recently, my research has dragged me down the rabbit hole of looking at over 1,000 videos on Instagram featuring smart glasses, or what they call point of view recording. And the range of these videos, viewed from advatorial advertising to lifestyle influences picking it up through paid endorsements and other, and all the way to Manusferic pickup artistry content. I bring that range up because in the first instance, you're seeing a particular normalization of lack of consent. When we look at branded content, for example, we're considering branded content to be the ideal representation of that particular product, yes. And even in those particular videos, you are noticing a lack of consent, a lack of normalizing may I film this? You're hearing secondary conversations being picked up. Landmarks being recorded that may or may not be legal. Going into areas where, for example, if you'd walked in with a video camera, or even a smartphone, you would be ushered out. And so this branded content is kind of normalizing this unspoken tacit rule of lack of consent. When you go to the more extreme, you're seeing that played out in absolute helplessness. Women inebriated. Women half-naked. Women being filmed on a beach, relaxing, reading a book, and some guy coming up to them and asking them, dropping some nauseating pickup line on them, coming day after day to the beach. If he was wearing a camera, oh, sorry, if he was holding a camera, eventually one of the women would call the police or other and he would be ushered off the beach, but because he's wearing glasses, they're not aware that particular behavior of recording from your face has not normalized. And what's worse, even if these women, or anyone in general, is aware that these smart glasses can record what rules and regulations are protecting us now. Has regulation caught up to this particular element of consent? I suppose my question about that would be, though. I don't know, there's a whole other limb you might want to be getting to, but how much is this a difference in degree rather than essence with what we've already done? I mean, I have seen people literally film me on phones in ways that are designed to look like that's not what's happening. That's sometimes it's obvious, but I'm sure it's happened many times, I haven't even noticed. We understand what people care around their phones now that they could be filming, and indeed, someone is probably filming somewhere in your vicinity at most times when you're in a crowd of significant number of people go back even further. Just cameras. The minute people started taking photos of people in public, there was a consent that had kind of been thrown out that we know there as well. OK, maybe it wasn't as in your face as me turning up to you when you're lying on the beach just directly in front of you and taking a photo the way a pap might do, but I could still do it from a distance, and you'd be in there, and I maybe didn't even know I was photographing you, but I could look at it later. I could certainly do that on my phone. I could blow up the image. In other words, this road of the erosion of consent is not a smart-glass problem that seems to me. This has been going on for a very long period of time, and it's just a matter of how powerful and unobtrusive the technology becomes. So for that reason, I wonder whether you think we're looking at something that is about a difference in essence rather than just a degree, because it seems degree to me. Well, from particular perspectives, you could speak that way, but when you go more into the man's very contact, the pickup artistry content, what I'm seeing is that is creating a new genre of harm. A new way of masking harassment through this kind of multimodality, this ease, this assumption that women aren't aware they're being filmed, all the way to this kind of store-coresque point of view where you're running up behind women in parking lots. Now, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't necessarily see people running up to others with their smartphones or their GoPro's. And so again, it's creating this new genre. And in this particular situation, men and women don't necessarily know what their rights are and what they're giving up. This particular exchange is forcing them into that exchange. You know one of the unintended consequences of this, though. And you know, I mean, Meadow will say, well, there is an LED light that comes on that's meant to indicate that, you know, recording this is going on. Let could we agree that we're going to leave aside whether that is sufficient, whether it's effective, whether it can be overridden. When you have the possibility of abuse of technology like this, one of the things that it does is it creates a veil of suspicion over anybody who may well be wearing glasses that might resemble the smart glasses. And then what it does is it creates that interval of distrust. That weight. Is this person actually speaking to-- are they filming this? So when there is a ubiquitous technology, it's not that smart glasses are ubiquitous quite yet. The uptake, it seems to me, has risen remarkably. But the very creation of that suspicion, of that distrust, it seems to, if I can use this wonderful phrase from George Elliott's middle march, it seems to tune all of our minds to the tune of distrust or contempt. To almost like the little Albert experiment. Potentially. I mean, look, there are many hypotheticals that we could explore. There is very much the opportunity of that becomes the unwritten law that we are now suspicious. And we stop profiling people wearing glasses, potentially. It would be easy enough to regulate your way around that. You just have to make sure-- I don't know-- all smart glasses must be polka dot and pink or something. No one would wear them. Well, they're two problem-solid at once. Yeah. I suppose the hypothetical that you ask about there has got is interesting. I mean, in some ways, it comes back to this point about normalization or acclimatization, whatever word you want to use. Where maybe it casts suspicion, or maybe we're just accepting this as the new grammar of society. We just kind of understand. This is just the way the things go on. Now we might lament that. What abuse is the cost of technologies? That makes me try to be used. Not abuse. No, no. You wouldn't lead with abuse, obviously. But this idea of possible-- you might be being filmed at any moment. I can imagine a world where people would habituate themselves to that. In fact, I could even imagine a generation that has already done that. I've lived there once. It's called autocracy. Well, it's different, though, because that's done by the government. No. And I think people-- No, not only have people-- It's done by the government who's dictated by the society as well. Right. So the society becomes, you know, brother, dogs on mother and mother, dogs on neighbor. No, I understand that. But at the center of that is a government power structure. The reason that no one-- I'm not going to-- the reason that I don't think we think about these things in those terms, even as you have these mega-corporate operations, who've ring up all kinds of data that allow them to do all kinds of things, is that I think very deep down people-- They draw a hard and fast distinction, even if it's not fully defensible. But they draw a hard and fast distinction between that power accumulating in the body that has an army, and police forces and so on, and that body accumulating in private companies that don't. Except when you put power over to these larger technologies, so rather than the government, corporations are having that power. I fully agree with that. But all I'm, if what we're trying to interrogate or anticipate is how people might respond to that, the fact that we see these things in fundamentally different terms just instinctively, I think suggests that we probably will respond differently to them. I mean, if they forget about these tech companies, if those tech companies didn't exist, and our governments instead decided that every time they wanted to provide a government service, that we're going to collect this rich kind of data on us and surveil us in this way and so on, I think we would have protested much sooner. But because it's in the hands of private companies, we kind of just swatted away. That's a really great way of saying it. We do just swatted away to the cost potentially of eroding our liberal democratic societies. I just wanted you to address one last thing before we ran out of time. One of the features that Meta had been exploring, that it named in a memo from May last year that was reported by the New York Times in February of this year, is what's internally called the name tag function in enough smart glasses. In other words, as you're looking through them, the glasses can identify through facial recognition technology, and identify other people if they have, say, an Instagram or a Facebook account, some of those details, some of that information comes up. In Facebook's internal memo, they're expressed a willingness to use a degree of political tumult in the United States, where civil rights organizations seem to have their attention taken up elsewhere, as an opportunity, this function in smart glasses can, in fact, be used. The implications of that, not just for everyday stocking, but also for law enforcement for surveillance, seem to me to be pretty troubling as well. It is very troubling because why would our police, why would the average Joa Jane need this particular technology? And this is where I go back to my first point. It's great that technology can do things, but why and to what cost. We're looking at this particular technology, whether it's artificial intelligence or biometric sensing or identification. Are we creating a situation in which we assume the world is an article, and we need all this surveillance technology to be safe, and from what? So we're creating a reality in which those who are able to are basically or states are basically holding guns at each other's temples in mutually agreed destruction. And so whether it's in a shiny packaging of glasses or whether it's in military tools or other, we really need to ask ourselves at what cost of this? Why do we need this particular technology? And what was wrong with what we have in the first place? And are we going to run by the rules of what one state is doing as a social duty? Because we don't seem to have covenants for runaway artificial intelligence or biometric sensing or identification. Which means the other way through that is quite pervasive trust across all sorts of nation states, which seems a very short supply. Or a series of international institutions and multilateral institutions are there in rude health to which the major powers of the world subscribe. International law will see this, will it? Yeah, okay. Well, we solved it. Thank you very much. Let's say it's been a delight. I mean, it's been terrifying. I don't want to underscore. I'm sorry. I imagine you have a lot of conversations that are quite like that. But your expertise has been invaluable. So thank you very much. Thank you for having me. That's Melissa Stilinovich, whose postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney. She's working on an ARC funded product which is governing immersive technologies. It could hardly be more relevant to this episode of the Mindfield, which has now concluded. You can catch us next week on ABC Radio National, of course. And in the meantime, anytime you like on ABC Listen and CISO. [Music] You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.