Brian Roberg's Blog

How Meta Is Pitching Their New AI Glasses

Meta announced a new model of "AI glasses" this week. While this is interesting on a technological level, what really struck me was the angle they chose as their selling point.

“Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay present.”

That was the second sentence of the announcement, preceded only by the lede sentence that stated the fact of the product's debut. Meta's sales pitch, then, is the promise of access to smartphone-like capabilities without it feeling (or looking) like you're using a device.

In other words, Meta is introducing a device that provides comprehensive mediation of the user's interactions with the world, while promising that those interactions will feel less mediated. This is precisely the kind of re-definition that can make a new medium profoundly disruptive.

The smartphone was disruptive largely because of how quickly it became the primary medium for so many kinds of human interaction. But even in the smartphone age, face-to-face conversation has remained a haven for unmediated communication. (Generally you can't consult your phone during a face-to-face conversation without the other person knowing you're doing so.)

Now, however, we seem to be on the cusp of technology that is intended for low-friction use even in face-to-face conversation. It remains to be seen whether such use actually is undetectable by the other person—perhaps seeing someone's eyes scanning text on their glasses will be as obvious a tell as their looking down at their phone. I hope that this limit holds. But even if it does, it's clear that in the coming years we will see tech companies attempting to expand the reach of the media they control even into interactions which we might have thought were immune to it.