Meta’s ‘smart’ glasses will make peeping Toms of us all - David Behrens

There have been many scare stories lately about artificial intelligence wiping us all out because it’s cleverer than we are. Even within the AI industry, executives are urging governments to put up guardrails against reckless development.

In fact, they’re taking it so seriously that Elon Musk no less – the out-of-control Trump ally who brandished a chainsaw at a political conference – is now saying his industry should slow down a bit.

Trump himself is conspicuously less clever than AI so his current opposition to State intervention doesn’t mean very much. His mind, like his combover, can go in any direction.

But the existential panic triggered by a British AI researcher in San Francisco who warned that doomsday could be less than a decade away has distracted us from an even more immediate threat that is literally right in front of our eyes.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and the only tech giant resisting calls for restraint, has begun selling designer ‘smart’ glasses that will make peeping Toms of us all by collecting everything we see and hear and feeding back the data.

Ten years ago this would have been science fiction but today it’s a marketable commodity, sold as a fashion brand and endorsed by A-list actors like Chris Hemsworth and even Dame Judi Dench, whose voice is built into the circuitry.

The glasses look like regular designer specs with added cameras and microphones, so you can capture everyone in your field of view without drawing attention to yourself. You can buy them with Ray-Ban frames for well under £400 or order them with prescription lenses.

But it’s less of a bargain when you consider that from the moment you put them on, you’re working for Facebook. They’re using you to spy on people and profiting from what you see. They should be paying you, not vice versa.

It’s entirely in character because voyeurism is in Facebook’s DNA. In its first iteration it was Facemash, a tool for peeking at photographs of women at Harvard University so that male students could ‘rate’ them. Mark Zuckerberg, who remains Facebook’s CEO to this day, was nearly expelled as a consequence.

So it was born bad. And you don’t need a pair of smart specs to see right through its hot air about ‘online communities’ that ‘unite the world’. A report this month from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the left-leaning British think tank, found that the number of young people without any close friends – real friends, not virtual ones – has increased five-fold in the last 12 years.

The relentless drive to be judged against online ‘standards’ has made users more insular, more vulnerable, less productive and more prone to mental health problems, whether real or projected onto them.

The reason is clear, says the report: they are being fed twice as much content from strangers as from their families and friends. Call this what you like: cognitive hijacking, digital alienation or just plain brainwashing, but there is nothing ‘social’ about it.

Nor is it a phenomenon that affects only young people. Impressionable souls of any age are easy targets for parasocial engineering, whether politically, sexually or criminally motivated. It is an insidious cancer eating away at society.

So while the ultimate sublimation of humans by AI remains for the moment theoretical, the malignancy has already set in. And it’s a mistake to think of antisocial media and artificial intelligence as two separate problems because the same technology and the same people drive them both. Where they differ is that AI has the capacity to enhance humanity as well as end it; social media does not.

The big question is whether we resign ourselves to walking around like zombies in silly glasses to feed an algorithm, or try to resist it. And it’s here that this month’s report offers a little hope because it goes some way to establishing a cause-and-effect link between online harm and the cost to society.

We now need to put a figure on the amount we are spending on benefits and healthcare for people whose independence social media has compromised. Once we know that, we can make Meta pay it, by way of a Social Contribution Tax.

We might be surprised at how easily they roll over; this year alone they’ve shelled out more than £13bn to resolve lawsuits in the US. Only the tobacco industry has ever paid more for wreaking social harm.

But they’d rather do that than stand up in court and be made to talk under oath about practices they know are indefensible.

Besides, the British bill would be a drop in the ocean to them. How big a drop? Let’s ask AI; it’s actually useful for working out that sort of thing.