In a restaurant today I was saying to a friend that if somebody were to walk in the door stark naked, people would probably be very upset. Furthermore, the proprietor would most likely call the cops, and the indecently exposed citizen would be issued a summons and perhaps carted away.
“And yet,” I continued, “a state of being naked is certainly more natural than a state of being clothed. So what is legal and socially accepted is, in this instance, precisely what is not natural.” My friend agreed upon this last point.
I said all this by way of leading up to a conjecture on the future of augmented reality glasses. “There may come a day, after everyone is wearing, when your appearance, from a social perspective, will be entirely mediated by the eyewear worn by others. After all, if everyone sees you visually transformed in a consistent way, then that transformation effectively becomes clothing.”
“And should this future come to pass, then it might become illegal to go about in public without wearing your AR glasses. To look upon people in their natural state would be considered indecent, an intrusion on their right to privacy. The man who walks around with naked eyes might find himself arrested for disturbing the peace, and perhaps thrown in jail.”
My friend seemed to find this prospect disturbing, but he did not argue against its plausibility.
This reminds me of a future where you get pulled over and cited for manually driving your car.
Which brings to mind the creepy question of who is really going to be driving those cars. If I go out for pizza at Pizza Hut, can Round Table pay Google to take me to their restaurant instead? And if the clerk mistyped my license code in the Amber Alert, will I find my self headed to the Police Station, greeted with drawn guns and riot gear? (Cue the movie “Brazil”…)
Back to the glasses: Suppose somebody hacks the appearance database, and swaps the “Ken Perlin” visage, with, say, “Edward Snowden”. During your trip to Washington DC.