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Post Snowden, I don't think Glass can ever happen Downvoters: don't just hit down... let me know why I'm wrong!
by alfiedotwtf 11y ago
Post Snowden, I don't think Glass can ever happen
Downvoters: don't just hit down... let me know why I'm wrong!
- Joeboy 11y agoWhy not? Have significant numbers of people changed their behaviour post-Snowden?
- alfiedotwtf 11y agoEven when talking with non-tech people, I've seen that it's had a chilling effect. People are now aware of the depth of the surveillance state. Sadly, this hasn't caused any uprisings.
- hiddencost 11y agoAmazon hired some key folks who worked on Google glass v1 (babak parviz and friends). Best guess, they're building something for warehouse workers.
- rasz_pl 11y agonot likely, Amazon is building something to _replace_ meatbag workers, why would they want to invest in meat?
- hiddencost 11y agoThey're replacing some "meatbags", in the next decade. And they only add Kiva to new warehouses, they haven't been retrofitting. So they'll have "meatbags" for a while. If they can build a compelling warehouse assistant HUD they'll then sell it to others and then expand into larger markets like everything else they do? If they can get something compelling for 5 years that saves 10% on labor, that's billions of dollars and established expertise in a major market.
- exhilaration 11y ago> ...they'll then sell it to others... But they didn't do that with Kiva, they stopped selling those awesome warehouse robots the minute they bought the company.
- rasz_pl 11y agoretroffiting probably wouldnt work due to layoffs compensation, severance package etc. Instead they will shut whole warehouses and replace them with cheaper ones. They already did that in Europe (moved from Germany to Poland)
- MBlume 11y agoUm. As a programmer I am in the job-destruction business. I think a society with fewer jobs and more automation can be a better society for everyone provided we simultaneously shift in the direction of more of a social safety net for the unemployed and hopefully a UBI. But right now a lot of people are very frightened by that job destruction and they're not totally wrong to be. It is causing a lot of short-term suffering, and a lot of people blame us. Let's not start calling the people we unemploy "meatbags", ok?
- icebraining 11y agoMaybe we can also get Clooney to fire them. Sorry, I mean give them an early retirement opportunity.
- rasz_pl 11y agoThats what we are from robots perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXvVVCr_6P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXvVVCr_6P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-1ry9zMi4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-1ry9zMi4o
- potatolicious 11y agoIgnoring the tone-deafness of "meatbag", human workers will continue to be part of Amazon's systems for a long time to come, so it makes sense to develop things for humans. Robots are - and will continue to be in the foreseeable future - massively expensive, require long lead times, and slow to scale. In the current state of the US economy I can hire several thousand humans to do a job practically overnight, while buying/renting several thousand industrial robots requires both considerably more money and time. Amazon's business is highly seasonal, which naturally favors options with low initial cost but high marginal cost (humans) rather than high initial cost and low marginal cost (robot). Near-total replacement of a high-variance business process with robots is likely impractical and will continue to be for a long time.
- rasz_pl 11y agough, meatbag is a pop culture reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-1ry9zMi4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-1ry9zMi4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYMnimTvt3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYMnimTvt3M
- knorby 11y agoPhones continue to be a bigger or equivalent privacy threat to the individual user and others than Glass ever was. The ability to discreetly take photos and short, low-quality videos also continues to be something highly possible with phones and other consumer tech.
- krapp 11y agoOne can at least assume that most people carrying phones don't have their microphone and camera on all the time - with Glass, that intrusion into privacy is designed to be unavoidable.
- knorby 11y agoThere is again absolutely no difference between phones and glass in this regard... Android phones now have trigger word detection ("OK Google") available as well, which is all that glass did. Again like a phone, the camera is only on when triggered. The only real difference is positioning, but you can hold a phone up, and most people won't notice.
- marshray 11y agoWhy don't you go spend a day with your cellphone taped to your forehead recording video and see how many people notice?
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI don't think the idea of a wearable computer is inherently a privacy concern. Having computers is an enablement, it puts information (and thus, power) in the hands of everyday consumers. The key differentiator, of course, is that Google Glass is a cloud input device. Auto Upload of photos taken with Glass is mandatory (despite my constant feedback to the Glass team regarding the concern). I would really love to see a computer in the Glass form factor which was truly open, and kept the control of the platform in the hands of the user. I loved my Glass hardware, but I had issues with the software and the cloud dependence.