The Future of the Wearables War

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of businessus wars ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app It's june twenty twenty five In a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles' Cyprress Park neighborhood, an immigration raid is underway Agents in dark sunglasses and bulletproof vests hop out of their cars, shouting orders as they look for people to apprehend This sight has become common around LA. The Department of Homeland Security has sent swarms of federal agents into the city, some from Customs and Border Patrol or CPP, others from immmigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE In less than a month, around two thousand local immigrants have been rounded up It's a time of fear and uncertainty made worse by the agent's anonymity Many of the names and badge numbers aren't always visible And their faces are often hidden behind baseball caps, hoods, and masks It's nearly impossible to know who the agents are. In this home Depot parking lot, a crowd of observers has started to gather, recording everything they can to document what is happening. As the border patrol agents try to push them back They keep recording. And that's when they notice something surprising about the sunglasses worn by one of the agents. They're meta ray bands In the middle of an immigration raid, someone from border Patrol is wearing a personal recording device Observers wonder Is he recording right now Will the glasses be used to identify protesters at the scene Or is he just wearing them for intimidation Whatever the agent's intentions, this moment adds to the growing unease over Meta's AI glasses When the company formerly known as Facebook jumped into the smart gllasses race in twenty twenty one If you saw it as particularly newsworthy, there were much bigger stories breaking about Facebook at the time Whistleblower Francis Huen, sharing thousands of internal documents with a Wall Street journal revealing Facebook's knowing contributions to real world harms or Facebook's subsequent rebrand to Ma meant to signal a pivot away from data collection and toward its metaverse against all of that Meta's collaboration with Raybands seemed like a harmless side quest But as interest in the metaverse faded An interest in AI boomed. Pivot And once it added an AI assistant to its glasses, brought a host of new questions to light. privacy, data security and the modern surveillance state To explain how we got here, we're going back to the exact moment meta Ray Bands stepped into the spotlight and found their way into daily life in a way No other smart glasses ever had before. withith that surge in popularity came hidden consequences becausecause now The question isn't whether smart glasses are here to stay. It's what people should do to protect themselves from their ever widening reach Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level The Capital One Venture X business card. What's in your wallet? Terms supplly, see capital onene d. com for details. When a charming neurosurgeon rode into western towns selling a persona of confidence and care Patients trusted him He wore cowboy boots in the operating room and became sought after by patients He promised to heal them Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies. This is a story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice. Listen to Dr. Death, the cowboy, wherever you get your podcasts, or binge the entire series right now, only with Audible From Audible Originals. I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. The origin story of Smart Glasses started before Meta and before Google Glass with a pair of Stanford students who really wanted to impress Mark Zuckerberg. Their invention, a pair of black frame sunglasses with a small camera embedded in the frame They envisioned a future where those simple camera glasses could one day do more like recognized faces and provide augmented reality displays. And while those students' specific version of smart glasses didn't quite make it The future they predicted did It's here. Meta sold eight million pairs of its Rayband smart glasses in twenty twenty five alone and similar products are rolling out from every major tech giant The future of smart glasses has arrived And so has the reckoning This is episode two Creep It's september twenty seventh, twenty twenty three in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley Meta employees are gathering for the annual Meta Connect confonference, where the company unveils new products, initiatives, and goals for the coming year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks ono the outdoor stage, the lush California greenery framing the screen behind him He waves at the crowd, trying to look casual But if you look closer, his posture is ramrod straight. Zuckerberg has a lot of careful messaging he needs to get right Every major tech company has a conference like this, Th Google's IO They've been a staple of the industry long before Steve Jobs revealed Apple's first iPhone But ever since then, every tech CEO has been chasing that iPhone moment moment when the crowd sees your new product and audibly gasps, knowing its debut will usher in a sea of change Zuckerberg is no different. He knows he's know Steve Jobs, at least where product reveals are concerned His last two Metaonnect keynotes made that painfully clear Both of those presentations have been hyper focused on one thing. The metaverse Remember those strange looking digital avatars with no legs Zuckerberg presented them at Connect twenty twenty one is the future of remote work. predicted people would meet up in Meta's virtual realm called Horizon Worlds, a sprawling app that costs billions to develop But Horizon Worlds and its legless avatars flopped Zuckerberg was roasted as an out of touch leader with no conception of what humans actually want And by twenty twenty three, the entire metaverse gambit is looking shaky. Meta Reality Labs, the division behind All things Metaverse, as well as its smart glasses, lost thirteen point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty two and Meta's shares dipped sixty percent investors are losing confidence One shareholder wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg, saying, quote, Meta needs to get its mojo back. So now, standing before a smiling crowd at Connect twenty twenty three Zuckerberg has a delicate needle to thread He needs to signal to investors that Meta has fresh ideas without abandoning everything he's built so far. He clears his throat and uses every ounce of charisma he can muster In his presentation, Zuckerberg focuses on three main pillars first the MetaQuest three headset. These sophisticated virtual reality goggles have been a passion of Zuckerberg's ever since Fpacebook bought Oculus, a virtual reality gaming company back in twenty fourteen. They're a key component to accessing the metaverse, so naturally, Meta has been working on improving them every year Zuckerberg still believes gamers will embrace them, even if he was wrong in his prediction that people would use them for work zoomes. But if you're trying to pull off a steep jobs level reveal You save your biggest surprise for the finale So in his second pillar, Zuckerberg talks about Meta's foray into the latest Silicon Valley obsession Generative AI Zuckerberg reveals that his team has spent thousands of hours developing AI personas you can interact with styled after different celebrities Want to get in shape Ask Victor, a fitness coach that looks and sounds like Duanne Wade Want to play a dungeons and Dragon style role playing game Get help from a dungeon master who looks and sounds like a certain nineties rapper I mean Who hasn't wanted to play A text, you know, adventure game with Snoop Dark crowd's response is friendly enough, But no real gasps yet So now, it's time for the third pillar, his couout de Gras A new improved version of Meta's Rayband smart glasses. Zuckerberg quickly lists the upgrades, which include improved audio, better cameras, a lighter frame, and more styles. But then he goes on to what he hopes will be the true iPhone reveal moment of this conference But the most interesting thing about this isn't any of those specks. It's that these are the first smart glasses that are built in shipping with meta AI in them So starting in the US, you're gonna get this state of the art AI that you can interact with, hands free Whver you go Zuckerberg hopes that out of the three pillars he's laid out today, and at least one of them will catch fire. Who knows, mayaybe people will love Meta's Quest three headsets so much they'll give the Metaverse another chance But given the way this keynote was organized, saving the AI glasses for last The underlying message is clear The metetaorporation is starting to chart a new course. away from horizon worlds and into the land of generative AI There's a reason why Silicon Valley' so bullish on AI In march twenty twenty three, just a few months before Zuckerberg walked on stage at Kanneg OpenAI debuted its latest large language model chat bot, Chat GPT four point zero Chat GPT four took the world and the news cycle by storm, thanks to its uncanny ability to write code and approximate human conversation Suddenly, no startup in the valley could get funded without a pitch deck that included the words genererative AI Founders everywhere scramble to cram AI functionality into every conceivable product So adding generative AI to meta smartlasses wasn't just a good idea It was practically a necessity to stay competitive Technically some artificial intelligence was already present in the Glass's original twenty twenty one version, which was called Rayban Stories Its voice activated assistant could obey simple commands like call mom or playay the Beatles White album. Google Glass users had that functionality as well. All you had to do was say, oK, Glass But the fluidity and speed of large language models come a long way since the early days of Siri. Now the responses are more natural sounding and can continue for longer than simply providing one answer to a query It's not a true live conversation But it resembles wine Here's Zuckerberg demonstrating the feature on an Instagram reel as he asks his meta raybands to help him braid his daughter's hair Hey Meta, how do you make a braid? T make a breraid Brush the hair to remove tangles Separate the hair into three equal sections and begin a basic braid by crossing the right section over the middle These new meta ray bands hit shelves in october twenty twenty three, shortly after their debut at the Connect confonference And even though the generative AI feature is still in beta and only available in the U.S The new glasses make major headlines because the verdict among tech reviewers is They're actually good. Unlike Zuckerberg's obsession with the uncanny avatars of Horizon Worlds, These smart glasses seem like something a regular human would actually use And a lot of humans do, starting with content creators. I bought the Viral Rayan metaglasses and we're gonna to find out if they're actually worth buying in twenty twenty four. So if you've been seeing this trend where people are recording without their phones, these are the smart glasses they've been using. You can live stream directly from these glasses. So if you're going live on Instagram, you can actually just click a button and switch to the glasses to get Live POV. There's also the headliner design in addition to Wayfare. and there are more colors, there are transparent ones like the one I'm wearing Those content creators are talking about the glasses themselves But creators also start using the glasses to film their everyday content One TikToker starts an entire trend by using her metaglasses to record herself in her bathroom mirror, lip syncing to a K pop song. Within weeks, the video racks up over eighty six point three million plays and launches hundreds of copycats. People start filming hands free POV videos everywhere at the grocery store, on the driving range Even at a local lunch counter, as they learn how to eat crawfish, One blind TikToker named Sadie, the blind lady, racks up half a million views by posting how the voice assistance features help blind and low vision people get around. You can use the glasses to ask Meta AI about almost anything that it sees. and you can get pretty specific with the questions too. Hey, Meta, look. What section of the store is this This is the dog treat section Now To peek behind the curtain for a moment, not all of these videos reflect organic interest in the product Some do, of course, but others are created through Meta's robust affiliate program which pays creators a commission on sales they generate from their content Still, affiliate links only pay off if the content is popular And in this case It definitely is The number of meta Ray band videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook explodes over the next few months. then Something really interesting happed Rather than peeking quickly as happened with Googoo glass or snaps spectacles, interest in metaglasses It doesnn't fall off a cliff peopleople don't suddenly bored of them From the release in fall twenty twenty three through the end of twenty twenty four Meta moves two million pairs of meta ray bands They're officially more than a passing fad They're a certified hit. So what did metaay bandans get right that its predecessors got wrong Well, it wasn't just one thing It was more like a combo platter They found the Goldilocks path The sweet spot between a device that feels like a gimmick and one that's too ambitious and too expensive to ever reach real people First, they nail the functionality Metaay bands strike a balance between trying to do too much like Google Glass and doing too little like Snaps and spectacles Glass tried to be a replacement for your phone. Spectacles? a fun novelty tool. Next, there's the price Starting at three hundred dollars it's low enough to be accessible to a wide range of tech consumers costs about the same price as an Apple smmartwatch Compare that to the fif five hundred dollars price type of glass. Or worse, the three thousand five hundred dollars Apple Vision Pro, a suouped up AR wearable that debuted to massive hype in february twenty twenty four, only to see disappointing sales in an embarrassing lack of demand Three hundred dollars is also high enough to signal quality After all, Rayban Wayfarer sunglasses without the metaamera Go for just under two hundred dollars. Snap spectacles sold out of vending machines were just one hundred and thirty dollars If price is too low, it can signal low quality regardless of whether or not that's true. So three hundred dollars That's another Goldilocks win for Meta And finally, the look. Partnering with a brand like Ray Ban gives Meta a massive leg up in the fashion department These glasses don't have the strange robotic look of a glasshole. Or the whimsical toy like design of spectacles They just look like regular glasses, which makes them a lot easier to work into your everyday life In fact, without the tiny LED light that signals the glasses are recording It's easy to miss that these ray bands have a camera in them. And that is about to set off a whole host of issues Because the more common meta ray bands become, the more ways people are going to find to abuse them There are people you're told to trust Lawyers, teachers. Eespecially docked But what happens when you put your life in someone's hands and they betray you? The hit podcast Doror Death is back And this season is unlike any other. doctor Death, the cowboy, is the story of a charming neurosurgeon who rode into western towns selling a persona of confidence and care He wore cowboy boots in the operating room and became sought after by patients promise to heal them Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies This season is about a doctor who was never truly held accountable for the patients whose lives he ruined A story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice that will leave you questioning who to trust Listen to Dr. Death, the cowboy, wherever you get your podcast or binge the entire series right now, only with Audible Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a Sucy romantasy series. Become your friend group's sci fi expert on the latest blockbuster book to screen adaptation Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting at five pounds ninety nine c., you'll get access to over nine hundred thousand audio books and podcasts, including trending bestestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts plans now start at five pounds ninety nine Be fascinated, be fascinating It's september twenty twenty four In Cambridge, Massachusetts, two Harvard students named An Fu Nuen and Kane Ardafillo are on a quest Wearing a pair of meta AI glasses, they cruise the greater Boston area looking for strangers to talk to They head down into the subway and approach a woman with curly brown hair and a red striped jacket who's waiting for her train. Oh, hi, ma'am. Wait are you that's?. Oh, okay. I I think I met you through like the Cambridge All right Yeah, yeah. It's great to meet y you. I'm Kane The train arrives and the interaction ends. Betsy goes on with her day But the young man she just met doesn't actually know her. He got her information on the fly by scanning her face with his metaglasses pay special attention here. becausecause this is the point where a product crosses a line from useful to unsettling. think Apple's airtag, right? Designed to help you keep up with your stuff, notot for someone to say track an ex partner, right? That's the thing Once a tool exists, Someone's going to test its edges in the real world often on unsuspecting people That's how new tech finds its limits. And if you're an innovator What do you do when real world behavior starts rewriting the narrative around your product? To be clear, this Mission Impossible style face scan isn't one of Meta Ray Ban's native features as part of a side project when and Artiffio set out to prove a point. that the off the shelf consumer glasses combined with freely available facial recognition tools could be used to identify strangers in real time. Do it They built a piece of software they call e X ray, which basically converts a pair of meta smart glasses into a doxing tool They pull this off in just a few days too, on a budget of four hundred dollars Using the metaglasses as video inputs, IXRay uses publicly accessible third party facial recognition tools dredge up personal data about strangers. personal the information gets It depends on the subject's digital footprint how careful they've been about their identities. For some, it might turn up their Instagram account and the details of a recent vacation For others, it might surface their alma mater, their employer, their personal phone number or even their home address UN and Artafio insists that the purpose of their project isn't to harm people Its to warn them They declined to publish IX rays code Even though plenty of people are asking Their point, they say, isn't to disparage the glasses, but Rather to show how dangerous it is to leave too much personal information online But this experiment in privacy invasion seems to be as much a promotional opportunity as it is a public service In an interview with NBC News, Dwen and Artaio reveal they've actually built their own AI assistant which they happen to be wearing around their necks And then we're creating a wearable necklace with a camera on it. Oh my God. That's cool. Yeah. The necklace camera and AI scans people's faces and connects the wearr with profiles other users create and willingly share. And we built it ourselves. You built that yourself? Yeah I do think The world is very lonely today. People don't really go up to people or like talk to people or learn about others in real life anymore The yeX ray Dxing experiment is starting to seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a jumping off point Because the more popular metaglasses get The easier it will be for people to follow in their footsteps and use metaglasses for nefarious purposes. that could be a problem for Ma, since trust in their company is already at historic lows We mentioned that the company formerly known as Facebook, integrated robust facial recognition tools into its products all the way back in twenty ten. Remember how Facebook pages used to suggest friends to tag in your photos Those innocent seeming nudges worked because of facial recognition software The same tech was also used on Facebook and Instagram as a way to help restore account access if a user got locked out. But over the next decade, as Facebook's reach grew So did its mountain of tagged images In twenty twelve, Facebook hit a billion users By twenty seventeen. That number was two billion And along the way, those two billion users uploaded many more billions of photos year after year until Facebook found itself sitting on one of the largest digital photo collections in the world. At the same time, the world beyond Facebook was waking up to the dangers of facial recognition In the late tw teens, reports emerged that the Chinese government was using facial scanning to profile the Uyighurs, a persecuted religious minority and in the U. S., we learned that law enforcement agencies have been using facial recognition aggressively here as well. There have been wrongful arrests, prosecutions, and even deportations based on faulty algorithms Suddenly A company of Ma size having the power to identify billions of faces It started to seem like a very bad idea. To Facebook's credit, the company reportedly declined to sell its facial recognition software to third parties But that was cold comfort once stories emerged about what Facebook was doing with user data on its own. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal of twenty eighteen Facebook got caught selling the personal data of eighty seven million customers to organizations that weaponized it for political purposes The result was a record five billion dollars settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in twenty nineteen Sounds like a lot Until you realize Facebook reported revenue of fifteen billionars for just the first quarter of that same year. in that context billion dollars barely constituted a slap on the wrist In fact, once the settlement was announced Facebook's stock actually went up highest price that year then came the so called Facebook files in twenty twenty one, leaked to the Wall Street Journal by former Facebook product manager Francis Huen These files revealed a range of alleged corporate misdeeds from serving toxic ads to teen girls on Instagram to helping religious hatred and violence spread in the global South Facebook's brand value went from shaky toxic Wh might be the rationale behind the name change from Facebook to meteta But in november twenty twenty one, the newly rebranded meta did something Interesting something that didn't quite get as much press The company discontinued its facial recognition system voluntarily Here's an excerpt from a company blog post issued by Meta's VP of Artificial intntelligence, explaining the company's thinking oating here. The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases. is appropriate end quote Underneath this cautious corporate phrasing is a clear message Please trust us But you know Trust isn't a feature you can toggle on and off whenever you need a little more. It's more like a running balance sheet Meta has spent years drawing that balance down, so now every new product launches into that deficit Even neutral innovations, like glasses that can do cool things, get interpreted through a negative lens, no pun intended. It's not enough to build something useful. You have to convince people you won't misuse it And that's a much harder sell Especially when your business incentives. haven't fundamentally changed Meta hopes that voluntarily rolling back one of its most robust tools for data collection will help build trust in its products, including the coming Maglasses But even without facial recognition, as the glasses get more and more popular throughout twenty twenty four into twenty twenty five Metaay bandans have been pushing right up against the very limits of social acceptability conjuring the glassholes of your. It's summertime, twenty twenty five A woman named Dina looks at herself in the full length mirror at her hotel She's in her forties with long dark hair and is wearing a pair of meta raybands She taps her glasses once and starts recording Deina is on vacation and she wants to save her every moment. So she takes her glasses with her to her next destination, a group cooking class with her husband. She joins about a dozen other students in red aprons, chopping vegetables and searing scallops. She taps her glasses a few more times, recording as she goes Everything seems fine until Dina starts watching her vacation footage. And she notices something she hadn't picked up on at the time The other people in her cooking class look uncomfortable At one point, a classmate is actually glaring at her Suddenly, it clicks peopleeople could see that she was filming them. They didn't like it is the glasshole effect all over again Dina posts her mortifying discovery on TikTok with this caption, I was in Ahole who wore metaglasses in a public place, didn't disclose it, and unintentionally made people super uncomfortable. Metaglasses are of course designed to be subtle, using just one small indicator light to show their recording. This small light is supposed to provide the best of both worlds. clear disclosure that someone is filming without being obtrusive But as the general public gets more and more familiar with meta ray bandans They also get better at spotting them. months after Dina's admission Another TikTok clip goes viral. This one shot on the New York City subway A woman on the sixth train suddenly realizes she's being filmed. With a quizzical smile, she walks up to the person filming her breaks his metaglasses in half The man posts the video under the title Help me find Karen hoping someone will bring her to justice Instead, hundreds of people rushed to her defense One commenter named Princess gets nearly ninety thousand likes with this Good People are tired of being filmed by strangers Prinis is right People are getting tired of being filmed by strangers But the strangers don't stop filming On Instagram, self described pickup artists are flourishing These accounts feature POV videos filmed with metaglasses in which men chat with women on the street commenting on their outfits while secretly recording Others pulled childish pranks on retail workers, trying to get themselves kicked out of big box stores filming the entire time Exhausted floor managers and cashiers learn to watch out for teenagers in black glasses with little blinking lights Remember in part one when a creator used his snap spectacles to record people for his prank show? Some metaglasses users take this behavior exponentially farther Creator Gabriel West sums it up pretty well When you have a group of kids around the ages of sixteen to twenty two walking around with cameras that nobody knows is a camera? Oh, we got problems! We got so many problems. I saw a guy try to sign in a planlanet Fitness with a severed goat head. as soon as these kids put them on, I feel like they immediately get the sense that they have to do something stupid, and it usually affects other people negatively This bad behavior often crosses the line into harassment. In september twenty twenty five, the University of San Francisco issues a public notice that a man has been prowling their campus wearing metaglasses. filming women without their permission This kind of behavior is no longer being called a glasshole It's being called a meta creep. two main drivers of creep behavior our accessibility and engagement As more people buy metaglasses More people make content with them, and like other social media content, The more outrageous and uncomfortable the content, The better it tends to perform So creators post more and more outrageous videos offten using affiliate links from Meta The affiliate link takes viewers to Meta's online store, where people can buy meta gllasses, giving a small commission to the original creator It just encourages them to post more bad behavior and the vicious cycle continues The incentives to keep posting obnoxious or criminal content Vretty powerful So creators go even further Since pranks work best when the person being filmed doesn't know it Creators share tips for covering or even removing the LED indicator light on their metaglasses Naturally, this content goes viral too. It's already difficult enough to film in public, I don't want to have a blinking light on my face. There is an easy solution to this. Let me show you exactly how to fix it. When Meta is asked to comment on bad behavior like this The company's response is usually what you'd expect We don't condone any harassing behavior which violates our terms of service And that includes responding to more serious instances like border patrol agents bringing metaglasses along on immigration raids Other CPB and IC agents follow suit as twenty twenty five rolls on The UK news outlet, the Independent, reports three instances that year of federal agents wearing metaglasses while carrying out official operations But beyond a few carefully worded statements There's not much sign that anyone at Meta is overly concerned It has finally created the feedback loop between product and platform that Snapchat was aiming for all those years ago Meta's Glasses are feeding a steady stream of content to Instagram, which raises the profile of its classes, which feed more content to Instagram Why would they do anything to slow that down On the contrary, metaay bands We just getting started Whether you' exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that willll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a Sucy romantasy series. Become your friend group's sci fi expert on the latest blockbuster book to screen adaptation Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app, with plans now starting at eight doll ninety nine cents, you'll get access to over one million audioobooks and podcasts, including trending bestestsellers hotest new releases and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audioob book every month Plus exclusive podcasts. pllans now start at eight doll ninety nine cents Audible Be fascinated, be fascinating I'm Leon Nefo best known as the co creator of Slowburn and Fiasco I had of course heard of O fans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism. A silent judgment, you might say. Who is actually using this platform? I am Hi, I'm Oly Fans creator and comedian, Gracie Kanan. I work from home now I'm on Oly Fans and In case you guys don't know what Oly fans is, ask your husband. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an On Fans account I'm not a sister, just to clarify. It turns out a lot of what I thought I knew about Only fans was wrong I felt like I wasted three point five years for something that wasn't real What happens when connection comes with a price tag? Listen to Only Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all episodes of Only Fantasy ad free right now, only on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app or on Apple podcasts. In september twenty twenty five, Meta releases an updated version of its Rayband smart glasses, which it calls Gen two. Confusingly, the Gen two ss are actually the third iteration of Meta's smart glasses, but who's counting More than ever, the AI aspect of these glasses is front and center in its branding. Far from being dissuaded by experiments like the Harvard Student Doxing Project, Meta is fully leaning into the AI capabilities of its product. In fact, alongside the Gen two's, Meta also debuts its upscale big brother Meta Ray band displays Displays cost eight hundred dollars and have chunkier frames to accommodate more teag These are the ones you might have seen Mark Zuckerberg wearing during keynotes and press events Rayband displays aim to deliver the true promise made by Google Glass a decade earlier An augmented reality head upp display When you turn it on, a digital hologram appears in the lens just below your normal field of vision. It can show you things like video calls, maps with turn by turn directions, and a digital user interface with buttons, so you can control the glasses with hand gestures, not just voice commands. To capture those hand movements, the glasses come with a stone colored wristband called a mural band bracelet that's also a Nintendo Wi controller. these meta displays do add some complexity back to a product that was once defined by its elegance, so there's reason to wonder if they might fall into the same traps as Google Glass But there are a few clues that displays might succeed in the same augmented reality space where glass failed First, displays looks a lot more like regular glasses, albeit thick ones instead of Google Glass's odd looking headbands Second, Meta took the time to work out the technical kinks that plague glass Here's Mar Kes Brownley, a prominent tech reviewer expressing surprise at just how well meta displays work. What meta has to show me is actually shockingly advanced messaging and even video calls O your glasses are pretty sick. So if you're in a video call, you can see the person you're talking to If you go to navigate somewhere, you can open up the maps And then get turn by turn directions and a rotating map that tracks with your head to match the direction you're facing Brownley points out that these glasses can even provide real life subtitling and live translation as a person's talking It could be an actual game changer for someone who's deaf, hard of hearing, or who just doesn't speak the language. But for Meta, the real benefit of displays is what these upmarket glasses do with stock price. Shares of Meta jump more than one percent in pre market trading just hours after the device is revealed at Meta Connect Markets aren't just reacting to the product They're reacting to this signal Higher inversion tells investors there's room to move up market. Exand margins, reshape perception It suggests this may not just be a novelty anymore category with real depth You don't always need mass adoption first. sometometimes you introduce a premium tier just to show the ceiling' higher. Do that? And the whole business looks more valuable Naturally, meta success with smart glasses has inspired a lot of competition having all but dumped the Vision Pro Apple is rumored to be developing smart glasses of its own. Google has partnered with iwar giant Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Android XR Google's new extended reality platform built around its Gemini AI thinkink of them as Google's real second shot at what glass was supposed to be, only this time they looked like normal glasses Google also announced a separate collaboration with Gucci, set to launch next year and Chinese tech companies Alibaba and Chiao Mi Each debuted smart glasses in the summer of twenty twenty five Th Those Harvard students, Ann Fu Muen and Kane Arafillo They're getting in on the game too onlyn a year or so after their experiment They've started their own smart eyeewear company called Mira Even ICE, the immigration agency, has announced plans to develop smart glasses of their own but she might be wondering. What about Snap, Ink You know, the ones who first cracked the stylish smart glasses trend from a few yellow vending machines Well, it hasn't given up on wearables either In fact, it debuted its own augmented reality spectacles in twenty twenty four One year before Meta's Rayband displays If you didn't hear about Snap's version, well Chalk that up to one more instance of Snap having the right answer just a little too early Despite the subtle differences in all these competing smart devices They all have one thing in common promise of ever expanding capabilities powered by AI this explosion in AI wearables. as a real human cause because As you heard at the very start of our series, AI doesn't just mean machine learning. sharing volumes of data with a vast human network F from the public eye It's february twenty twenty six in Nairobi, Kenya. in a sun dappled stretch of the Nairobi arboretum group of data workers sit in a circle in the grass A speaker stands in the middle of the circle Holding a microphone and shielding her eyes from the sun This is a meeting of the Data Labelers Association, a workers' rights organization that helps its members advocate for better labor conditions. Today's topic is empowering digital workers to know their rights, and organized for fair treatment. There are still people who actually do not know anything about AI in terms of the workings behind it. and this is actually very intentional L to make it invisible, to make it look like this shiny object that no one understands what it's like.'s like very automatic and beautiful and tech. Hiding the labor and hiding behind the scenes of AI these hidden workers. are the ones labeling the objects to train the AI models, working on a layer of information technology that few people ever see up close They are AI's human support system clicking endlessly on object after object in a seemingly infinite stream of content And yes, this labeling work has a purpose It serves people like Sadie, the blind lady, whose glasses can help her cross the street or tell her which aisle she's in at the pet store But the data workers also have to sift through every supermarket frank Every sexual harassment encounter on college campus Organizations like the Data Labelers Association or a much needed tool to help them protect themselves That's a tall order when the demand for their services is only going up The more that Meta and its competitors work on ever more powerful versions of its smart glasses The more these workers in the global South are, put under the gun And right now Metaay band users don't have a choice in the matter either In twenty twenty five, Meta quietly removed the option for users to disable cloud storage of its data meananing that everything you say to your glasses or film with your glasses is collected and kept by meteta. There's no way to opt out And as if that weren't enough MedA seems to be considering reversing its policy on facial recognition Remember when the company made a big show of removing this tool from their platforms Well, according to internal memos leaked to the New York Times in early twenty twenty six Meta has made plans to introduce the feature into both its ray bands and the sporty Oakley versions it introduced last year So far Meda denies using facial recognition in their products. It's easy to see how in reality This would replicate the Harvard Dxing experiment. That' S skingle So Why does Meta think this will fly Given how hard it fought to win back user trust According to that internal memo Comany feels like it has a unique window of opportunity And that's because the consumer protection groups that normally act as privacy watchdogs currently occupied by the civil unrest caused by the current administration Here's how it itss memo puts it We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns But Meta may have miscalculated how much those civil society groups care about the dangers of facial recognition. and how closely Ma is being watched by human rights groups around the world In late February twenty twenty six Two Swedish papers published a bombshell story on the Kenyan data labelers The exppose led to a class action lawsuit against Meta over privacy concerns playing out as we speak Meanwhile