It would be great if some of the anti-Telsa crowd could turn anti-billboard. Some of the billboards are so bright and obnoxious. Electronic billboards in public spaces should be as illegal as shitting on the street.
Never mind billboards. Once people realize they can replace their girlfriend's face with Margot Robbie augmented reality is going to become very popular.
There's now boat billboards that are the same way. Wanna enjoy a nice day at the beach? Too bad, someone parked a boat just offshore blasting a million lumens of alcohol ads straight into your eyeballs
There's a Black Mirror episode where soldiers are fighting against monsters, but one of the monsters stabs a soldier with an electric prod that turns out to be a device to disable the soldiers' brain implants, implants which are there to turn scared refugees into aggressive insect-like monsters, that the soldiers don't hesitate to shoot.
But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...
ST:Voyager had a similar episode. The Commander gets captured and subjected to brainwashing to hate a specific group in effort to make him a foot soldier in a war. After being rescued and treated, the Commander still felt immense hatred at sight of the group he was told to hate, even though they helped rescue him. It closed with him making a remark about wishing it were as easy to stop hating as it is to start.
Unfortunately, we are where we are today. “Modern media” (whatever that is) and amplification from social media has allowed hate/outrage evolve from being a sledge hammer (e.g. “USSR is evil!”) into being a scalpel for daily governance and policy setting. Just look at how many people suddenly advocated for jailing (or executing, as I overheard at my kid’s baseball game) a specific former immunologist and presidential advisor. We’re tribal by nature and all too eager to treat the out-group as “less” than we are.
Some states in the US have laws regulating the brightness of billboards and how frequently they are allowed to change the image on them if they're visible from a highway. Of course, that requires someone to enforce the law, and the billboard lobby is one of the most effective at getting their way.
I've traveled to Hawaii (specifically the Big Island) several times and drove H19 countless times between Kailua-Kona and Waikoloa. For about 30 minutes you are driving through old lava fields with a view of the ocean, some goats and the other cars on the road. I've never realized the lack of billboards and I thank those responsible for that. I can imagine that drive inundated with billboards if it was allowed. Trying to sell sunset cruises, sunscreen and your next time share.
I have long predicted that someone will come up with a popular AR/VR filter that selectively replaces people (of a certain look, ethnicity, gender) with something else (modifying them or just removing them), which will put the last nail in the coffin of shared reality
I can understand you thinking it's sad (it is), but I really can't understand not thinking people would want it. Look at camera filters. There's even a "touch up" feature in Zoom. Of course people would want it. Nothing about the way people's revealed preferences would lead me to believe this wouldn't get used by a lot of people.
These features are all on the "sender" side and not on the "receiver" side. I don't imagine many people are running beauty filters on on images received from their girlfriend (but maybe they are?), and I don't see AR being much different to that.
(and a complete face replacement is a few steps beyond a mere "beauty filter")
Does anybody have any interest whatsoever in AR? It seems to be an entirely corporate pushed thing, probably as a means of opening up a new domain of monetization. But in real life, and even on the internet for that matter, I've found practically nobody who has any interest in it whatsoever.
Yeah yeah - 'if I asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses', but if they knew what cars were that quote wouldn't exist. Everybody knows what AR is, a sizable chunk of people have tried it, and nobody seems to want it. If there were some ultra high end AR goggles for $10, I still wouldn't buy them (sans obvious angle shoots like reselling/repurposing the hardware or just pack-ratting it away in a closet).
The reason I mention this is because of this paradox where everybody assumes its success, but nobody has any interest themselves in using it. I think this is because AR is just about literally always a part of sci-fi and so we kind of assume well it must be what the future holds. But it seems like one of those many ideas that sounds way better than it actually turns out to be in real life.
When I'm snowboarding on an overcast day, it can sometimes be hard to see the exact shape & conditions of the snow ahead so I have to slow down to make sure I don't catch an edge on a 'hidden' mogul. I'd like an AR system that used LIDAR/FLIR/etc. to augment my vision to see these features better.
I'm also bad at learning & remembering a lot of people's names at once in social settings, so I'd like a discrete pair of AR glasses that used a local model to add virtual nametags to people in certain situations. (Assuming I controlled the data - I wouldn't like it if this meant data about my acquaintances would be sold behind my back).
So there's at least two potential AR applications I'd be interested in, assuming they could be made to work in a trustworthy & reliable manner for under $1k.
Your argument is that when computers were room sized, nobody would want turn by turn directions.
There are probably uses for AR today that are legitimately useful. I've never used them but I hear good things about the uses in factory floors and classes with technical machinery. But the expectation is always that that the glasses with a ridiculous battery pack (the room sized computer) will become something of a size where every single person will want to have it on them at all times.
Living memory of people alive right now are the room size computers becoming dirt cheap ESP32s.
Okay let's speak of the far distant future. Would I want them if they were contact the size of contact lenses? My opinion is secondary there because there's approximately a 100% chance that they would end up banned. I, like many if not the overwhelming majority, would absolutely refuse to interact with anybody wearing them. And it wouldn't be out of protest of the technology itself, but simply out of privacy issues. What people say face to face should remain between them.
On top of that I have little interest in discussions in real life turning into internet discussions where it's two people searching "proof my view is right [and his is wrong]" and then repeating arguments they oft have little to no understanding of. And there are also practical issues - girls would probably not enjoy the fact that there'd 100% be insta-strip apps. And then there's the dystopia of surveillance and all that stuff. Nah, not gonna happen.
More generally I think smartphones changed the world hard in one direction but, at scale, are starting to change it back in the opposite direction. They enabled great convenience, but it turns out that the nature of 24/7 tech connectivity are also quite unpleasant in many ways. And speaking of things being banned it's already quite obvious that many apps today are already working, intentionally, to function as digital drugs that will, almost certainly, also end up being treated as such in the future.
I think the one and only reason that we're stalling control of these 'digital substances' is because intelligence agencies have tremendous back-door influence and we've created a sort of global honey pot. There's probably still some fantasies of pre-crime and the nonsense belief that if you just control the message you can make people believe whatever you want (really worked well for the USSR, North Korea, and everywhere else that's tried such...). Once we get over the myopia, these things are on their way out.
Never mind billboards. Once people realize they can replace their girlfriend's face with Margot Robbie augmented reality is going to become very popular.