AI & XR Life changing (and controversial) Use-Cases at work, business & politics:
A year ago I wrote an article named: “AI & XR are made for each other! But is this also the end of our privacy?” in which I described the advantages of merging AI and Machine Vision into AR/XR glasses. But as someone who always wrote about privacy, I also said it’s gonna be creepy.
So, talking about CREEPY, let’s go down this road, Black Mirror style!
- Reminders — AR with AI personal assistant that tracks everything you see and do, and then reminds you things (like where are your keys, where you’ve parked your car, etc). When it comes to AppleGlass, I expect the AI (and our personal Data) will stay on our device (M1 On-device AI)!
2. Faces — AR + AI to help you recognize people in events, meetups, etc. by using Face recognition to pull their data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google, etc.
3. Body language — AR + AI to help you during business meetings, and special events by analyzing other side’s body language, micro-expressions, and intonation.
4. Lie detector — AR + AI to help you recognize when business partners, insurance agents, politicians, and public figures lie to you and the public.
5. Women Guardian — AR safety app that women can use when they feel in danger — walking down the street alone at night, or even when they are alone with the boss or some other male colleague(s) at work… Me2.0?!
6. Men Guardian — AR safety app that men can use to avoid false complaints when they are alone at work with other female colleagues. A insurance policy / log. But, it’s not a replacement for trust between the sexes!
7. Lost child — AR + AI to help the police use AR glasses owners as a “crowdsource” to detect lost children in public places, and automatically notify the police and the parents.
8. Public safety — AR + AI to help people identify criminals, rapists, and pedophiles at public places, schools, and kinder gardens (crowdsourced).
9. School — Child abuse at school can be prevented if kids will have smart AR glasses to automatically detect inappropriate behavior / violence from teachers. It can also automatically notify the parents.
10. Card game — AR + AI app to calculate your odds to win card games, such as poker. Could be handy, but also illegal in some cases (Casino etc.)…
Scared yet?
There are plenty of other use-cases and fields in which AR with AI and machine vision can help, but as you can see, in addition to privacy issues, it also brings huge moral and ethical issues. Some will be solved by regulations, but some won’t. In addition to prevent a “Black Mirror” like future, we’ll have to keep in mind that even if western countries will regulate this, people will always hack their device, organizations will find ways to override regulations, non-western companies (China, etc.) will continue to collect data, and even western companies will find themselves in awkward situations again (if our data will be stored on the cloud — Because, as usual, expect data leakage!) So, people will have to remember to take responsibility on their privacy and personal life, and to take off their glasses in specific situations (Toilet, Dating, Sex, etc).
Oh, and watch Sight!
Don’t worry!
Scared yet? Creepy? Don’t worry! As always technology is a double-edged sword! I’m optimistic, it’s gonna be fine! Apple forced the industry to take Privacy seriously, and even Google has some privacy and permissions manager feature in Android! And if not?
Well, FOSS or Open Source AR/XR products will be a natural evolution! Valve’s Index VR glasses and their SteamDeck is a great example, they support open-source and most of their products are Linux based. In addition, there are more and more companies and organizations going in this direction: OpenXR, XRdesktop, Project NorthStar, Collabora, StardustXR, and many more.
