TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Nick Bolton reports that Google is working on augmented reality glasses, and they will be available by the end of the year.

One Google employee said the glasses would tap into a number of Google software products that are currently available and in use today, but will display the information in an augmented reality view, rather than as a Web browser page like those that people see on smartphones.

The glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby, the Google employee said. “You will be able to check in to locations with your friends through the glasses,” they added.

I hope these fail.

Cheers to Google for trying to do interesting new work, but I absolutely abhor the idea of a constant connection to the web, and augmented reality glasses are about as bad as it gets.1 Imagine trying to enjoy dinner with friends with these glasses on. You’ll be talking, and your friends—looking at you from behind these idiotic glasses—will be checking in and maybe even posting a video to the web.

I hate it, because it creates the feeling that you’re not really there—you’re looking at the world through a screen, through the data it presents. Your focus is on the web, because that’s the screen you’re looking at the world around you through. Your priority for focus is the web, and then the world. That’s insane.

And that’s not technology’s purpose, at least in my view. Technology should seek to make life better for people, in small and big ways, as humans. It shouldn’t fundamentally change how we relate to and interact with reality.

I recognize the world that we take for granted—one where a once-unbelievable amount of food can be grown per unit of land, where antibiotics make most bugs an annoyance, where we can be anywhere in the world in a day, where we can talk to anyone in the world at any time—is the result of dramatic technological changes which severely altered how people live. These changes, though, didn’t change how we relate to the world around us or our nature as humans.

But we’re approaching a new technological era where we can change it, where technology isn’t just something we interact with, but something that can be be a part of us, and where what it means to be human, something that’s been static for as long as we’ve been conscious, is up for debate.

I realize that sounds very science fiction, but we’re coming upon a time where it’s a reality, and we’ll have to decide those sorts of things. Augmented reality glasses are the harbinger of this sort of change.

1. A device which taps into our brain’s visual system and inputs this sort of data into our vision is my idea of hell. And unfortunately, we’re really not that far from being able to do that. [↩]