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

Technology inherently alters how we live, what we do, how we think, how we die. Modern medicine has turned many diseases that, when contracted, brought along death more often than not into things of the past or minor annoyances, and injuries that would have been debilitating or deadly into ones that can be overcome. The motion picture didn’t simply make plays something that could be watched over and over again by many different audiences, but created a mass entertainment accessible by nearly everyone, and changed how we learn about news events and conceive of them. The car allowed for suburban sprawl, and for people to travel where they please, whether for the evening or for extended trips across thousands of miles; and in so doing, the car changed what the American “ideal” is, spawned innumerable cultural groups centered around it, and helped construct a rite of passage into adulthood for teenagers. Getting your driver license and first car is the first step toward being an adult, but also a right to freedom, to being able to go wherever you please on your own or with friends on nothing more than a moment’s notice.

So as long as humans have been creating tools to influence the world around us, the tools—technology—have been influencing us, too. It’s an inevitable byproduct of using something, and this isn’t exactly a new insight. Smartphones and now “wearable” computers like Google Glass are merely the latest human technology to influence their creators.

But while they may only be the latest example of something that’s been happening for as long as humans have created tools, there is, I think, something very different about so-called wearable computers like Google Glass. They have the potential to integrate themselves so deeply into the user that over time, and as they develop further, there will be little reason to differentiate between the device and the user. Removing your Glass device will feel very much like losing a limb or sense—something that you’ve grown used to depending on and using is gone. Through this much deeper integration, these devices could fundamentally alter the human experience and what it means to be human.

That might sound alarmist, like science fiction, or—if you own a smartphone—just remind you of that small moment of dread, like something’s wrong, when you leave the house without your phone.

Wearable computing has much more potential than “wearable” implies. Instead, through overlays on our vision (or more direct connections with the brain, potentially), things like Google Glass can become another sensory input as well as an output. Google Glass already allows you to look something up on Google (“Google, how tall is Mt. Everest?”) and get directions without ever pulling the phone out of your pocket, or using your hands at all; you ask, and the information is spoken to you or overlaid at the top of your vision. It’ll notify you about your flight this afternoon or messages you receive, and you can reply to the message, too. You can snap a photo or video. All without using your hands, and it’s all—again—on top of your vision.

The ultimate goal is to form a direct connection between our brains and the web, and all of it that entails. Google Glass is merely a first step toward that, and merely a hack that hijacks our vision to provide input to our brains and hijacks our voice for control. A direct connection with the brain is obviously ideal; there’s no “glasses” to wear, or need to use voice to control it, which isn’t very efficient. In Steven Levy’s In the Plex, he recounts a conversation he had with Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004:

Back in 2004, I asked Page and Brin what they saw as the future of Google search. “It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.

“That’s true,” said Brin. “Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it will be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk to, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them and suggest useful information.

The web’s information will be our brain’s information, and the web’s services will our brain’s tools. We would be able to immediately answer whatever question we have, or information we need. If you’re fixing your sink, instructions on how to do so (or maybe a video?) are just a thought away. In a few moments, you’ll be able to make fabulous chicken tikka masala. Humanity’s knowledge will have a direct pipe into our brains. And you’ll be able to do incredible things, too. You could snap a photo with a thought, send a message to someone or file away something you’ve come across to a note-taking service. You could control your home’s lights and television. You could… well, the list goes on.1

And, of course, you’ll be able to check Twitter and Facebook, and post to them, wherever you are and while doing whatever else.

I say all this because I don’t think there’s a significant difference between doing all of this through a Google Glass-like device or some direct brain connection, as Page proposes. If they’re successful at their purpose, both will be quickly adapted into our senses. Just as we’ve gotten used to being able to pull out our smartphones whenever we have a spare moment or need to settle some dispute or trivia, we’ll reflexively ask Glass the answer to a question, or to snap a photo, or to check the news real quick, or to look through our Facebook and Twitter stream, even at moments when we probably shouldn’t. And since the amount of effort it takes to do so will be so much smaller than it is with a smartphone (which is already terribly small), we will do all of it with that much more frequency. No event will be complete without taking a photo and posting it to our social network of choice, because unless it’s documented and unless we’ve stuck it in everyone else’s stream, then it didn’t really happen.

I don’t think that’s a positive, and it says nothing about the social effects of having a web-connected camera and microphone strapped to our faces. (Dustin Curtis touches on it in his piece about his experience with Glass.) But what I find most troubling is the philosophy underlying Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s thoughts on devices like Glass. They say that Glass’s goal is to get technology “out of the way,” but that isn’t it. The idea is that we will all be better off if we’re always connected to the web, always on, and have uninterrupted and instantaneous access to it and humanity’s “knowledge.” The idea that Page expresses is that if I can immediately learn about something I don’t know much about, I’ll be better off. I’ll be able to make smarter decisions and live a deeper, richer life by spending the time it would have taken to research and learn about something on more meaningful and substantive tasks.

I think, though, that is a terribly deluded and shallow understanding of what it means to “learn” about something. When we—humans—learn about something, we are not simply committing facts to our memory so we can recall them in the future. That’s a very tiny part of a much larger and much more important process. To “learn” about something is to study the information (when historical events occurred, what happened, etc), find connections between it and other things we’ve learned and experiences we’ve had, and to synthesize it into something greater—knowledge. Knowing, say, the Pythagorean Theorem in isolation isn’t of much use, but connecting it to your need to identify another object’s location suddenly makes it very useful. And more abstractly, knowing Roman and Greek history isn’t very useful all on its own, but being able to learn from it and apply its lessons to current political difficulties might prove very beneficial.

Synthesizing information into knowledge isn’t an instantaneous process because that’s not how we work. We form conclusions and connections between new information and other things we know by thinking through it and living it. Conveniently, and crucially, taking time to learn something or to answer our own question by pouring through books and articles and our own investigation allows us time to do that. We have little choice but to draw conclusions and form connections between what we’re looking at and what we already know or have seen before because our brains are working over the material for the answer we seek. We find knowledge when we engage our brains. And, moreover, we often stumble into things unintentionally while actually looking for something altogether unrelated. Things that end up becoming more important than what we were originally looking for in the first place.

Page’s idea—that we would be fundamentally better off if we had immediate access to all of humanity’s information—ignores that. It provides facts, but elides conclusions and connections. What’s worse, it starves us of opportunities to use our skill for critical thinking, and since it is a skill and is therefore something that must be developed and practiced, it starves us of the chance to develop it.

I find that troubling. Glass is not a technology that is designed to amplify our own innate abilities as humans or to make us better as humans, but rather one that acts as a crutch to lean on in place of exercising the very thing that makes us human. I don’t find that exciting. I find that disturbing.

This may all sound like so much hyperbole. After all, we’ve adapted just fine to prior new technologies, despite Luddite claims that it will destroy us. And, undoubtedly, we will adjust to this sort of thing, too, and the world will not come crashing down. I think, though, that this sort of thing—a more intimate connection between us and computers—is a path we are heading down, and since its more intimate nature also makes it more influential over us, I think we should deeply consider what it’s intended to accomplish for us and what might happen to us in the process.

Technology isn’t a force of nature that just happens. It’s something that we create, and so we should question why we are creating it. This has always been true, but I think it’s even more important now that we do so.

Technology, I think, should exist to improve our lives as humans, to magnify the good and minimize the bad, rather than change our nature or experience. That’s what I believe.

That’s what I believe, and you may disagree. I would suspect many do, especially those with more of a bent toward transhumanism. And that’s fine. But we should be having a much larger discussion about our technology’s intent than we are now, because it’s only increasing in importance.

1. If the idea of a direct brain interface seems ridiculous, it shouldn’t; researchers have shown that monkeys can control a robot’s motion with their brain activity, and the means they use are relatively rudimentary. The brain appears to be able to adjust to and adapt new sensory inputs. [↩]