Google’s AI-powered smart glasses are a little closer to being real
Google is working on a lot of AI stuff — like, a lot of AI stuff — but if you want to really understand the company’s vision for virtual assistants, take a look at Project Astra. Google first showed a demo of its all-encompassing, multimodal virtual assistant at Google I/O this spring and clearly imagines Astra as an always-on helper in your life. In reality, the tech is somewhere between “neat concept video” and “early prototype,” but it represents the most ambitious version of Google’s AI work.
Watch this video and enjoy being mildly horrified, both by how thoughtless this technology will make us if we needn't be bothered to remember our friends' taste in books and also by just how much data Google will be hoovering up about every single thing we do.
These types of interactions with AI will become anodyne in short order, especially in younger generations, but imagine the implications of a network outage on an entire generation of people who will have have needed to remember or learn anything. (I say this as a stan of the Reminders app. I use it all the time, for everything, adding reminders via Siri on every connected device I own, but yes, it's been somewhat detrimental to my ability to remember certain things. And yeah, I'd be rightly fucked if every Apple device I had went dark all at once. But boy, is it useful.)
Have you ever wondered how many people asked AI which candidate to vote for in the last election? Do you think that number isn't going to grow dramatically over time?