“There's some people that say that would be great. Having to think through everything you do, having to be more careful, that would make us a better society, everyone will be better behaved. But I just don't think that's how the world works. In the beginning there were these radical transparency advocates who would say we'll reach a time when you won't be embarrassed anymore, and we'll be a more forgiving society. But I just don't think we've gone that way. We just love to attack people when they do something wrong. We wouldn't have a better-behaved society. We would just have a constantly punished society.”

Yeah, I mean, well, I think most people don't have the inclination to use it. I think what could shift is if this does become mainstreamed, you know, if Meta does decide, as it's been talking about, to put this feature into its glasses and just start selling that to people, then it leaps from you have to go to this weird website to do this to, oh, this is just a feature that I have access to through one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Then I think people just start using it. You get on a train and you just kind of casually look around. Who else am I on the train with? You're at a restaurant. You just start looking around just because like you can. It's so easy to do. It's very seamless. Meta says they don't want to do it this way, that it wouldn't be a like identify a stranger. It would be identify people in your social network. But I just think that like once the guardrails start falling, that that would happen. And I think that what shifts is that if we do start living in that world, you just have to be so much more scared all the time that you're going to make a mistake. And I just think it would be similar to the way that like when we go online and you're on a social network and you kind of say something and you have to be very careful. Like you're like, is this going to come back to haunt me? You'd have to live your life like that. Like I thought about, I was on the train the other day having a sensitive conversation and I stopped right away. I was like, oh, I can't have this conversation here. You know, somebody might realize who I am. Maybe there's some person on this train that uses PimEyes and is going to make the connection between what I'm talking about and the fact that I'm working on a story about this. I just think we'll have to go through life with that feeling of you're under surveillance all the time by the people around you. They could connect this to you in a way that could haunt you.

Yeah. And like, that's a serious example where you're talking about a sense of story and you realize, oh, I shouldn't do this because someone will overhear it. And then I think of the classic tweet, which was something like, oh, I love waffles. And someone replies, oh, so you hate pancakes then? It's like, no, I'm talking about waffles. You have to live like that in the real world where anything you do might get taken out of context. You might get unmasked immediately by a pair of smart glasses. And you have to constantly moderate your behavior. Not that I'm advocating for go out and be a social nuisance. Like you won't be able to be normal in public anymore. And like, that's terrifying to me. It could really, really change people's behavior.

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Actually, these perfectly to what I was going to ask now, which is that there is obviously a backlash to these glasses, and they haven't even launched the facial recognition stuff yet. Like it's not even out yet, and people are mad already. And of course, we had the Google Glass stuff, the whole glass hole thing years ago. I still think the good Google Glass as a device looked pretty cool.

Really? Wow. Oh my God.