There were some small pleasures. Fashionwise, these were the nicest sunglasses I’ve ever owned. The little speakers were useful for audiobooks, and the tiny camera captured all kinds of images: the Empire State Building, a blizzard, my son eating a giant pretzel, an older couple holding hands on a sidewalk. When the A.I. successfully identified a John Donne quote (“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”), I felt a surge of fatherly pride. Once, a Cybertruck came rumbling toward me, and as I reached up to snap a picture with my glasses I felt that something momentous was about to happen — that this collision of two notoriously obnoxious technologies might rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and send confetti raining down, and we would all wake up in a new reality where everyone is kind and all leaders are competent and the world’s abundant resources end up where they belong. Instead, the Cybertruck drove on. And my sunglasses were still on my face.
Mostly, my glasses made me sad. Sometimes, people would notice the camera and recoil in horror, hiding their faces, like vampires sprinkled with holy water.
“Hey, Meta,” I said one day. “Tell me a joke.”
“Why did the baseball go to the doctor?” they answered, and I prepared myself for a modest chuckle. Then the punchline came: “It had a little ‘run’ down in its batting average!”
I stood there, for longer than I should have, trying to figure out why that was funny, struggling to accept what I knew in my heart was true.
Obviously, this is not the technology’s final form. Meta reports that seven million people bought its A.I. glasses last year, and as competitors pile on, the product will continue to evolve. But wherever it goes next — smart contact lenses, neural implants, nanobots injected straight into our corneas — the trend is clear. Silicon Valley is in the business of mediation. It wants to insert its products as directly as possible between us and the outside world. It would like our veins to circulate smartphones. But what does it mean for the human mind to be trained, constantly, to ask an external presence for help?
In the end, I decided that the only thing I really wanted my Meta A.I. sunglasses to do was to be sunglasses — i.e. to shade my eyes from the sun. In the future, this is how I plan to use them. I will let their battery run down, permanently, and then I will throw them in my bag and pull them out on very bright days. And when, inevitably, I forget them on a train or drop them in a lake, then it will be absolutely fine. The suffering will be over — theirs and mine.