Life has felt more than a little Black Mirror lately, and the arrival of the latest season of Black Mirror over New Jersey's spring break just felt like a big dose of what life already feels like. But that's OK, at least to one of us. Dark dystopias with a tiny liquid center of hope can sometimes be the therapy we need.
In the latest episode of Tech Therapy, we get into Black Mirror's gaslighting trick in one of its episodes, the clever little mobile game they made for another, and why we'd love Black Mirror to get even tricksier in the future. But we also discuss the very Black Mirror things we've been thinking about recently.
For instance: Google has suddenly shown off its newest AI-powered smart glasses at a recent TED conference. Scott demoed Google's Android XR tech last December, it's expected to be discussed in more detail at Google's I/O developer conference in May, and he puts it all in perspective.
Meta is also expected to have something similar this fall, a more advanced version of its Ray-Ban glasses with displays inside that's a stepping stone to the company's farther-off AR glasses prototype Orion we tried last September. And Apple? Its glasses are still nowhere to be seen, although the Vision Pro is starting to get some small AI updates. Scott's followed AI and AR glasses and headsets for years, but what will we be seeing next, and why is it all happening? All-seeing AI is on deck.
And, while the world has gone through its latest viral AI obsession making action figures of themselves, CNET went a step further by 3D-printing one (thank you James Bricknell for this wild likeness of Scott!). How embarrassed are we to give into another round of AI-generated memebait? What does Scott think of his plastic doppelganger? We get into why it's so disturbingly compelling sometimes.
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