I have worn glasses and contact lenses since I was 12. That's 32 years and counting of wearing visual aid accessories in public, so I should be used to it. It should feel like a natural extension of my body by now.
That's what I thought, at least. Until I got AI glasses to test. And now I'm more uncomfortably self-conscious about it than ever before.
I got sent a pair of Dymesty AI glasses to test for review, you see, as they have an audio-recording function with AI summary tools for anything you record. It's intended for office-present professionals in particular, ones who go to lots of meetings and want to focus on the conversations they have in those meetings, rather than having their attention continually and repeatedly diverted to a laptop screen, notebook or phone for taking notes.
And as such, it's quite a clever invention. Glasses are something a lot of us wear already, and it integrates a process we had to rely on additional accessories to perform until now, in theory streamlining our productivity and making our professional lives easier.
Dymesty have designed the glasses impressively discreetly too, with small buttons on the underside of each temple, which themselves are very understated in bulk and design. The buttons are used to start and stop audio recording, answer and hang up on calls (the glasses can connect to your phone), stop and start music, or activate the AI voice assistant.
This assistant can live-translate conversations in over 100 languages, Dymesty claims, and indeed in my initial tests it seems to work quite impressively, as I've had audio from my computer play for my glasses to translate on the go.
But why haven't I gone outside to talk to people yet to do that, you ask.
Because I can't stop feeling like a creep.
But they don't record video, what's the problem?
We've had a few attempts at launching smart glasses over the last decade or so. Google Glass fell spectacularly on its face when people were decisively turned off by their ability to record anyone and everyone in public without their knowledge.
The Apple Vision Pro stumbled even more impressively when people were again turned off by their ability to record anyone and everyone, plus everyone who wore them looked incomprehensibly stupid.
And now, Meta, and Google again somehow, are showing humanity's remarkable aptitude for never learning from history by launching even more powerful, more inconspicuous and intrusive AI-powered smart glasses than ever before.
In a world where privacy seems a distant memory, it's hard to know where the line is by now. But for me and my decidedly Millennial sensibilities, I've always felt like going out in public with a secret recording device, hidden inside something innocuous, something a large percentage of people wear or carry daily, is for two types of people: secret agents and creeps.
And I'm not a secret agent.
But I don't want to be a creep.
So what can I do?
To creep or not to creep
The invasion of people's privacy is a real safety concern in today's society. This applies in particular to women, with disgusting things like upskirting and secret intimate filming being something they have to worry about almost every time they go out, especially in settings where they should feel safe and carefree. It can be an unsightly tool used in male violence against women, often used for blackmail, coercion and both physical and mental abuse.
Also, with other minorities facing increased bigotry, introducing another thing to make them worry about being watched and judged in their daily life without their knowledge or consent is the last thing I want to bring into society.
Maybe I'm being oversensitive, I don't know. The Dymesty AI glasses don't record any video, but rather audio only, but even then it makes me feel uncomfortable. More so than if I have my Plaud Note recorder, or my clip-on Rode mic around other people.
Maybe it's because those are distinct products others can recognise as recording devices, while glasses that record you might feel like a violation of trust in everyday items you encounter all the time.
What do you think, my dear readers? Is this a legitimate concern, a reason for people to take pause with what they do and how they do it, or should I get off my moral high horse, get with the postmodern, technology-saturated, always-on, always-connected world and just accept that this is the way things are now?
