Dorian Benkoil on Augmented Reality

I like Benkoil's attitude at the end of the article:

"Of course, there is a 'creepiness' factor in some of this, and it can be frightening to think of the possibilities for invasion of privacy. But let’s see how far the technology goes in the coming months and years — a lot of the apps are still glitchy, require downloads and don’t quite work all the time — then see what objections are raised to how the technology is being used."

AR is definitely creepy... and Benkoil's suggestion that the technology might prove a useful tool for journalists wanting to dig up a bunch of extra information on people during interviews is creepy, too. When standing face to face with someone else, having a conversation, most people like to think that all the communication is out there in the open. It's acceptable to 'read' the other person's facial expressions and tone of voice without him/her knowing about it, so long as any additional 'reading' is done on the sly... after all, it's understood that this is something people naturally do, and the information gleaned from 'reading' other people in this way is strictly conjectural anyhow. But facts -- or, at the very least, what the person you're communicating with wants you to believe to be fact -- are generally mediated and exchanged via speech. If a reporter were to use a smart phone equipped with AR technology to gather facts on an interviewee, it would presumably have to be without the interviewee's knowledge and consent. She would literally be on the record before opening her mouth. Now imagine the not-too-distant future of AR technology... if we could somehow get the data routed through camera lenses in our eyes, we'd pretty much be where Molly is in Neuromancer, minus the retractable finger knives. We could access all there is to know about anyone simply by looking at them. According to the standards of today, this would almost certainly constitute a serious violation of privacy rights... but at least it'd let us dispense with the pleasantries.

Getting back to the quotation above, what I like about Benkoil's attitude here is that he seems to understand the futility in trying to project the moral rules of our current technological paradigm onto the paradigm that is currently emerging. Thanks to the proliferation of SNSs, cultural attitudes towards privacy are already starting to shift... is a shift beyond indignation at the scenario described above really that hard to imagine? Ultimately, limiting prohibitions on technology use puts the power of ethical choice in the user's hands. While the potential for wrongdoing is there, we can't really know the 'wrong' of the matter until we've pushed the envelope just a little.