Forgive me for thinking that this awesome new technology will actually make our lives worse instead of better

All the tech promises of the past 30 years come to mind

I have to admit, from a purely technological perspective, these glasses look astonishing, an incredible leap forward for human communication and collaboration, the real-world equivalent of a Starfleet universal translator:

Ryan Radia @RyanRadia

These glasses can't come to market soon enough:

…and yet, I’m sorry, I just can’t feature that these things will do little more than make people less capable and less sociable and less able overall. They’ll be a net drain on humanity, in other words.

Why? Well I mean, that’s pretty much been the arc of technology since around 2006 or so; certainly since the smartphone first debuted. Pretty much all of our major tech advancements since then—ubiquitous phones, social media, streaming services—have only served to largely cripple us at the communicative, linguistic, creative and social levels.

It is not crazy to imagine that Google’s language glasses will have the same effect. Here are some ideas why:

• These glasses do not, in a technical but still vital sense, actually allow you to truly communicate with people who do not speak your language; they simply let Google translate your speech into someone else’s language, and/or they let Google translate other people’s words into your own language. It is Google, in effect, who is doing the communicating here. All of the intimacy of human connection, of language, of true communication, of genuine understanding, the idiosyncrasies of meaning and the fabric of idiomatic conveyance —it will all be outsourced to Google. Don’t deny it; that’s the point. It’s what Google wants and it’s what anyone who buys the glasses wants. Nobody will actually learn a new language with these things or learn how to talk to someone who speaks another language; they’ll just follow a readout of a computer translator. It would be the somewhat functional equivalent as if Google offered a subscription service wherein a master linguist would accompany you everywhere you went and translate foreign languages back and forth for you. You might immediately understand what some more people were saying, but the process would be unsexy, corporate, shallow, and not anything remotely equivalent to learning a new language, much less communicating with it. Kind of like having to bring and/or wear Google-branded glasses everywhere.

• This is yet another piece of technology that will demand that the user becomes functionally dependent upon it in order to accomplish important daily tasks. Seemingly most people in modern developed countries do not even drive within their own metropolitan statistical areas without often having their smartphone give them step-by-step instructions; this is deeply, ahistorically odd stuff, where hundreds of millions of people have willfully lost the ability or the desire to recognize landmarks and read street signs within their own immediate watersheds. Do you not think Google’s language glasses will have the same effect as far as language is concerned? Yet another deeply ancient and normal skill—in this case, learning some unfamiliar words or phrases or lexicons or, hell, even an entire language—will be replaced by a chunk of computerized plastic that will just do it for you. Awful.

• A major portion of human interaction will yet again be snuffled up and squirted out through a massive technology corporation. Gee, could this have any practical downsides to it? Have tech corps ever shown themselves completely willing to control and throttle communication between human beings in order to further the creepy political ends of the people running them? Is it possible that if we delegate so sensitive and intimate a process as cross-lingual communication to a major Palo Alto corporation, we might see language and communication itself eventually standardized, stultified and smothered according to the expectations of bloodless 21st century corporatism? I mean, just let your imagination run wild and picture such a thing happening.

You can argue that this is unlikely. I would suggest it’s arguably inevitable at this point. Every major tech advancement of the past several decades has fallen more or less entirely short of its initial wild ambitions. Everyone thought the Internet would usher in an explosive era of searing knowledge, soaring test scores and limitless intellectual potential; yet our students these days know less and do less than pretty much every other student generation in American history (though they do have access to limitless reels of sick pornography).

Smart devices, especially tablets, were supposed to transform lower learning into global competition-ready educational powerhouses; their only notable effect seems to have been that elementary students increasingly can’t focus on anything at all that they cannot swipe. Smartphones, too, were supposed to link us all to each other in a web of nonstop communication, yet everywhere you go people stare almost exclusively at their phones and virtually never at one another. Even men and women out on romantic dates often just look at their phones. Hell, television was once hailed as the great transformative tech development of our society, but now it’s mostly a vehicle for reality shows and “binge-watching” of lame ensemble cast miniseries. This all just keeps happening.

So yes, I think the glasses will probably be the same way. Heck, you should bet on it! Find a bookie who’s willing to take that action. If he doesn’t speak your language, just snap a crisp $50 bill and he’ll get the message. There are many ways to communicate that don’t require Google to do it for you.