On: Is It Possible to Make Smart Glasses That Aren’t Creepy?

August 2, 2026.

They are designing new glasses. They will see what you see, hear what you hear, and think about it for you. The question in the paper is whether they can be made not to be creepy. This is the wrong question.

The right question is simpler. If a stranger walked into your home and stood beside you, watching your hands as you wrote, listening to your conversations, noting the titles of the books you pulled from the shelf, you would ask him to leave. If he refused, you would call for help. If he then offered you a pair of spectacles so that he could do it from a distance, you would not ask if the spectacles were creepy. You would ask why you were considering wearing them at all.

But a company, a stranger with a logo, proposes it, and we ask how to make the proposal palatable. We audit the privacy policy, not the premise. We debate the creepiness, not the consent.

A million engineers will work to make the glasses lighter, the battery longer, the recording sharper. Not one is tasked with making the wearer ask, “Why am I putting this on?” The greatest engineering challenge is the one they ignore: the engineering of the habit. Once it is normal to see the world through a lens that also sees you, the debate ends. Custom will have done what no argument could.

I do not understand the transaction. You give a corporation your unedited gaze, the raw material of your attention, the context of your private thoughts. In return, you get… what? The answer is always a function. A convenience. But you have traded the sovereignty of your own perception for a tool. You have volunteered your eyes and ears to a system. You have put the watcher in your own field of view and called it vision.

The truly remarkable thing is not that they are building these devices. It is that we are discussing how to build them better, rather than why we are building them at all.