Google Glass: A new way to ignore humanity

Tales from the Water Cooler

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, introduces the Google Glass last year (Getty Images)

One particular news story this week triggered the Oddness Alarm which is fastened to my kitchen wall (it’s kind of like a smoke detector, but doesn’t give off a high-pitched shriek if activated. It just emits a bewildered “You what?”, like Alan Sugar on hearing the word “obfuscate”).

It seems that Google maxi-millionaire Sergey Brin, inset – who is worth hundreds upon hundreds of Yankee dollars and owns six of Saturn’s rings, gave a speech to the Technology, Education and Design conference in Los Angeles and moaned about the way smartphones “emasculate us”; how they make us spend dinner dates ignoring our companions and looking down at our glowing crotch.

He has therefore invented a pair of glasses which will allow the user to surf the net while looking straight ahead. Whichever site they want to view will appear as a head-up display on their glasses’ lenses. And I think, no matter how Joe 90 this sounds (Google it), it’s bound to be fraught with risk.

It’s bad enough when you are talking to someone and their eyes glaze over (not that this has ever happened to me, obvs, but friends have described what it’s like: that moment when you become aware that the listener is, well, not.)

But imagine how much worse you would feel if you found yourself in the queue at Greggs with a friend and you began babbling on about how Frasier was clearly never as good once Niles married Daphne. Instead of their eyes glazing over with boredom, you would suddenly realise they were watching the bloody One Show on their glasses! Thanks for that, Sergey.

Twitter.com: @DonaldAMacInnes

Twitter: @DonaldAMacInnes