You've probably seen that Google is coming out with glasses that act as a computer screen, essentially, while you're walking around interacting with your life. If you get a phone call, you will see an image of the caller in your field of view and you can then say, "Answer" and talk to the person. If you look at a bus stop sign, the glasses can tell you whether the bus is delayed. If you're going down on someone, the glasses could tell you which way to swirl your tongue. ... I made up that last one, but I'm sure there's an app for that.
Now I'm not one to fight technological advancements. When the beeper was replaced by the cell phone, I didn't say, "Watch out. It will destroy our society and make drug dealers harder to identify!" When the carrier pigeon was replaced by tattooing a message on a shaved hamster and then using a sling shot to hurl it to the intended recipient, I didn't yell, "It's not natural! And furthermore the hamster should be wearing a cape!" And when children were replaced by Call Of Duty III as the time-consumption mechanism of choice, I did not protest. I am not a Luddite. However, I do believe in thinking about the consequences of things. Once the Google glasses come out, assuming they even remotely work, idiots will be walking into traffic left and right. ... So that's a positive. But there are negatives as well.
Will the real world without the glasses even come close to competing with the enhanced world? Once you can do your day-to-day chores while simultaneously watching Dame Judy Dench's shocking sex tape out of the corner of your eye, will you ever be content with the regular world again? We're already ADD dopamine whores running around looking for our next tiny fix, whether it be a retweet, or a "like" on a Facebook post, or a guinea pig wearing a cape flying through your window with a tattoo of a thumbs up on it. Now imagine you've essentially got all those things in your field of view 24/7.
Then tack on the inevitable advertisements, which is the real reason these devices are even created. Every bit of data you look at during your day to day will be collected, analyzed, stored and categorized. As opposed to just your online life, now your ENTIRE life will be fed into an algorithm that will then decide what you SHOULD want and SHOULD need. The glasses, if used regularly, will nearly be indecipherable from your own thoughts. And they will know what you're looking at in a store, what you ran out of recently at home, what your kids have been nagging you for.
"You're a 22-year-old male living in Delaware? You should probably pick up 12 Hollister shirts and some Axe body spray. You're a 53-year-old female living alone in Vermont? Well, here are some things that cats like!"
We will become useless vessels simply kept around to do mindless mechanical tasks and then funnel the money made from it to corporations. ... So that part won't be any different than now. But there are other negatives ... that are different ... and new.
Imagine the amount of surveillance good ol' Homeland Security will be able to do once they're able to see everything you're looking at in your day-to-day. They can literally tap into millions of pairs of eyes around the country at any time. And you KNOW they won't just watch you when they claim it's important like at airports or near government buildings. They'll also watch you when you fall down! That's right. They will collect all the videos of all of us tripping over sh**, and slipping on things and they'll put it into an endless streaming fall-down channel that they'll watch and laugh and laugh and laugh! Do you want that? Look, there are people falling down right now and it's quite possible no one is laughing at them. Does that sadden me? Sure it does. I'm only human. But perhaps it's a price I'm willing to pay to avoid the dystopian world Google is proposing.