
The most significant changes in technology usually arrive gradually.
First cameras moved into our phones.
Then phones became constant companions.
Then social media transformed private moments into public entertainment.
Now the camera may move directly onto the face, accompanied by artificial intelligence capable of understanding more of what it sees.
Each individual step can appear relatively harmless.
Together they point toward something much more consequential.
The greatest danger of AI glasses is not simply that someone might record you.
It is that we may be building a culture where everyone increasingly assumes they are being recorded–and begins behaving accordingly.
Once that happens, something fundamental changes about human interaction.
Conversations become performances. Strangers become suspicious of one another. Embarrassing moments cease to disappear. Consent becomes harder to establish, and ordinary people become involuntary participants in someone else’s content stream.
The school hallway is only one warning.
The larger issue is a future in which no encounter is necessarily private, no reaction is guaranteed to remain fleeting and every moment of everyday life has the potential to become content.
That may prove to be one of the most consequential prices society pays for putting artificial intelligence directly in front of our eyes.
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