 Okay, Glass. Check out these sweet shelves. Those are some pretty sweet shelves. Alright, so Google Glass' Explorer program is clearly wrapping up because they're letting ordinary jerks like me wear them now. Don't get me wrong, it's still more expensive than any computer I've ever owned, and most normal people aren't going to spend that kind of money on something that's still in beta and has only eight useful apps. But I didn't buy Google Glass because the commercials convinced me that it was going to change my life. I knew it was going to need a lot of work before it was truly a disruptive technology, and I knew that I wasn't getting Jarvis or the computer from the Starship Enterprise, but I bought it anyways. For me, this is a souvenir of a Google Kickstarter for something that Google Glass is only a figurehead for, something that I really wanted to support. In 1958, mathematician and grandfather of computer science, John von Neumann, suggested that technological development was going to continue to accelerate to a certain point, beyond which we would be totally incapable of conceiving what human life would be like, a sort of 88 miles per hour of technological history. This unconceivable future point has been dubbed the technological singularity. A lot of people like me get really excited about the possibilities of that, often with an almost religious fervor because, you know, we really like Star Trek. One of the predictions of this unpredictable event is that humans will somehow become one with machines. I am locutus of Google, resistance is futile. It's kind of an arbitrary distinction as it is. I mean, humans already have prosthetic limbs and I feel naked without my cell phone and you probably can't remember a phone number that you learned past 2003, but just because it's a difference in degrees doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. There are a few ways that humans and machines have been growing closer already, but Google Glass might be a platform for a certain version of the union between them that's called augmented reality, something that I'm really excited about. You've probably seen some version of augmented reality in movies already. In Iron Man, you see it when you look out from Tony Stark's helmet. In Terminator, you see it when you look out through the Terminator's eyes. The little floating text things in Sherlock are also a great example. Augmented reality is a real-time overlay of information on top of the real world. If you're eating your lunch and look down at it, maybe you see how many calories are in it. If you're working on your car, maybe the bolts that you need to remove are highlighted. One thing that I'm excited about augmented reality is that it would make the distinction between the information that you can remember and the information that you can access obsolete. And although it's partially because I can't remember what day of the week it is, it also has massive implications for the sorts of things that human beings ought to learn. Google Glass is designed to be a sort of floating window to the network of information that we've attached ourselves to, and it does a lot of stuff that's very close to augmented reality as it is. For example, there's a third-party app for Glass called Refresh that gives you a quick information blurb about people that you have an appointment with. Like if you have in your calendar lunch with Larry Page at 2pm, at 1.50 a little window will pop up that has Larry's Facebook status and his latest tweets, that sort of stuff. By the way, Larry, if you do want to do lunch, call me. We can talk about skeuomorphisms and how nobody's going to know what this is when all of our phones are head-mounted. The Google Maps navigation is also really close to augmented reality. If you're walking somewhere and you turn your head, the built-in compass picks up that movement and then swivels the entire map overlay so that it stays in the same orientation. That's really cool. Now, there's no reason that you couldn't do these things on a smartphone instead, but they do make a lot more sense on this thing, especially in the context of augmented reality. And the physical shape that technology takes, whether it's a keyboard, a track point mouse, or a touchscreen, really defines how the software that's written for that technology evolves. Like playing Angry Birds on a keyboard is technically possible, but you'd have to find some very bored programmers and give them a lot of beer in order to make that happen, and people would still prefer to play it on their touchscreens. And think of how you'd be watching YouTube right now if this whole mouse thing hadn't taken off. The bottom line is that right now, Google Glass isn't much more than a smart Bluetooth headset with a heads-up display and a camera. It doesn't do anything that you can't do with a smartphone already, and the battery life isn't great, and sometimes the user interface can be a little bit awkward. But the physical shape of this technology might be just what we need to make augmented reality, reality. The chance of making that happen is worth the investment for me. And I'm a little bit of a Google fanboy, so I'm happy to see them taking a crack at it. What do you think? Will Google Glass become Jarvis? Is the technological singularity actually happening, or is it just a pipe dream of sci-fi fans? Do I look like an idiot in these? Leave comments, let me know what you think. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.