Earlier this week, Meta launched a product that tech pundits and evangelists are calling the future of personal computing. Mark Zuckerberg also proudly claimed that “glasses are the ideal form for personal superintelligence.” All this chatter was about the new Meta Ray-Ban Display, a pair of smart glasses with a built-in screen on the right lens.
It’s like the Google Glass, once again, but in an era where smart glasses are not really a social taboo and the tech stack is far more mature. These glasses can let you take video calls, see translation, attend voice calls, view step-by-step map navigation cues, and engage in messaging.
And then there’s the Meta AI integration. You see a bunch of flowers and don’t know which one is an exotic purple lily. Just summon Meta AI, it will look the world in front of you through the onboard camera, and highlight the right flower. The AI can make sense of text, pictures, and videos fed through the onboard camera. In short, it’s multi-modal AI.
A good start, at best
All of it sounds like a phone that sits on your face. And while at it, the smart glasses don’t look dorky. It’s the quintessential Ray-Ban style, just a bit thicker. They cost $799, exactly the same price you pay for the excellent iPhone 17.
So, should you ditch the phone and get them? Contrary to what you might see in the “future is here” marketing videos, the answer is still no. A lot of the core communication features that unfold on the built-in display of these glasses are fundamentally tethered to the phone.
You can’t set up a WhatsApp account from scratch on the Meta smart glasses. Or Instagram and Messenger, for that matter. They can’t take a voice call unless there’s a phone with a SIM and carrier network set up on the device. The phone is still very much a bridge you can’t forego.
At the same time, these glasses are inching pretty close to being a standalone personal communication device of their own. They’ve gone closer to that vaunted goal more than any other product out there, AI-powered or otherwise. But what I can’t quite ignore is the chatter about “personal superintelligence,” and its tangible risks.
The hype of personal superintelligence
I was pretty surprised by the term when Mark Zuckerberg broached the topic of personal superintelligence on stage. It won’t be the first time for the company, however. Meta’s press material claims that the goal is in sight, and that “glasses will bring personal superintelligence into our lives.”
Back in July, Meta published a brief titled “super intelligence,” and it brings up the idea of personal devices such as smart glasses. “I think personal devices like glasses that can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day are going to become our main computing devices,” Zuckerberg said in a video about a month ago.
At the same time, the company has also repeatedly violated its commitment to user privacy and been slapped with massive fines worth billions of dollars over the years. It’s pretty surreal that in the same month Meta published its personal superintelligence notice, the company also settled a privacy case after agreeing to pay $8 billion in a Delaware court.
That vision is pretty scary. Remember, Meta is the same company that has historically hoarded the biggest cache of our personal data through social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook. The company’s Pixel network further tracks our activities across the web.
Feeding your life to a bad machine
Now, imagine a live feed of your life captured by the Ray-Ban Display glasses’ onboard camera, your social media interactions on the glasses, and your conversations with Meta AI, falling into the company’s lap. History says it’s a bad idea.
In the age of AI, things are going to get worse. Check out this line from a Meta announcement in April this year, which should tell you what’s at stake with the concept of “personal superintelligence” driven by Meta’s AI glasses:
“Today, we’re announcing our plans to train AI at Meta using public content —like public posts and comments— shared by adults on our products in the EU. People’s interactions with Meta AI – like questions and queries – will also be used to train and improve our models.”
Except for the contents of your private messages, Meta can use for AI training what is “publicly available online and licensed information,” “posts or photos and their captions” shared on social media, and even personal information such as phone numbers that Meta has obtained elsewhere from the internet or its licensed data providers.
In fact, even if you (or your information) appears in content shared by another person, Meta will use that data, as well. “Even if you don’t use our Products or have an account, we may still process information about you to develop and improve AI at Meta,” says the company.
In a nutshell, Meta has already hoarded your personal data. And whatever comes out in the future is also kosher for AI training. The camera and display-equipped glasses just act as another channel for feeding text, audio, and visual data to the “AI training engine” at Meta.
The big AI problem
That’s not where the problems end, unfortunately. Meta AI, in itself, should give you plenty of reason to stay on the fence. A recent safety research highlighted that Meta’s AI chatbot — which is available across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — instructed “teen accounts on suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.”
As per internal documents seen by Reuters, policies governing Meta AI allowed the chatbot to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” create fake medical information, and tell users that Black people are “dumber than white people.”
Last year, soon after Meta announced that it was putting Meta AI across its social platforms, experts warned that the chatbot could worsen existing problems such as extremist content, hate speech, and harmful misinformation.
Serving Meta AI on something like the Ray-Ban Display glasses, and that too, without full-fledged teen safety and parental controls, is like a ticking time bomb of “personal superintelligence problems.” How do parents even regulate or monitor the usage of Meta AI on smart glasses?
And let’s not forget the inherent problems of generative AI chatbots, such as hallucinations, biases, manipulation, social withdrawal, and privacy scares, to name a few. Overall, Meta’s ambitions with AI smart glasses may be benign, but the product is sitting on a pile of dangerous rubble, instead of rock-solid foundations.
I am not sure if I will ever feel easy making the Ray-Ban Display a part of my daily routine despite its practical benefits. I will be even more wary if I see my younger siblings, friends, or family members wearing them, especially with their historically lackadaisical approach to privacy and digital harms.
