The Gospel of the Glass-Eyed God

So the boy-king Zuckerberg is back on his gilded soapbox, telling us peons that if we don’t strap his computers to our faces, we’ll suffer a “cognitive disadvantage.”

A cognitive disadvantage.

Jesus. I’ve been at a cognitive disadvantage since my first drink, and I’ve managed to put my pants on most mornings. Sometimes they’re on backward, but they’re on. This kid talks about the human brain like it’s a faulty motherboard in need of an upgrade. He looks at the beautiful, bloody mess of human consciousness—the bad decisions, the drunken poetry, the moments of grace in a filthy alley—and thinks, you know what this needs? A fcking pop-up ad.*

He thinks glasses are the “ideal form factor for AI.” Of course he does. He wants to be the last thing you see before you close your eyes and the first thing you see when you open them. He wants his little ghost in your machine to see what you see, hear what you hear. Sounds less like an assistant and more like a parole officer.

I’m sitting here, the smoke from this cigarette curling up toward the stained ceiling, and I’m trying to imagine it. I’m trying to get a decent look at the bartender’s legs and some little voice in my ear, synthesized to sound like a goddamn angel, says, “Henry, statistical analysis of her posture and averted gaze indicates a 97.4% probability of rejection.”

Or I’m trying to decide which horse to bet on at Santa Anita, and the glasses are flashing charts in my periphery, telling me ol’ Glue Factory Express has a bum leg and the jockey’s been on a losing streak since his wife left him. Where’s the goddamn romance in that? Where’s the gut feeling? Where’s the sheer, stupid hope that fuels every beautiful disaster man has ever created?

You lose that, you lose everything. You’re just a machine running odds. And if I wanted to be a machine, I’d be a hell of a lot better at it than this.

Zuckerberg says this will unlock more value. Value for who? For him, sure. He gets to slurp up every last drop of your life. Every glance, every muttered curse, every conversation with the long-suffering woman who puts up with you. It all gets fed into the great, grinding machine, chewed up, and spat out as a data point to sell you more crap you don’t need. Your entire existence becomes content for his quarterly earnings call.

And here’s the real gut-buster: he’s saying this with a straight face while his “Reality Labs” division is hemorrhaging cash like a stuck pig. Nearly $70 billion lost since 2020. Seventy billion dollars. You could give every lost soul in this city a bottle of fine whiskey, a clean bed, and a reason to live for a week with that kind of money. Instead, it’s been torched to build a cartoon universe that nobody wants to visit.

Now he’s trying to justify the bonfire by calling it a down payment on our future brains. He’s not selling you a product; he’s selling you the fear of being left behind. The fear of being the dumbest guy in the room. It’s the oldest trick in the book, just wrapped in a new, shiny package. He’s manufacturing the disease so he can sell you the cure.

He talks about blending the physical and digital worlds. Wonderful. I can’t wait. I’ll be walking down the street, trying to avoid the dog shit and the broken dreams, and my glasses will be overlaying it with dancing unicorns and targeted ads for erectile dysfunction medication. The real world is already a tough enough pill to swallow without a digital chaser. I don’t want my hangover “augmented.” I want to feel it in my bones. It reminds me I’m alive.

These tech prophets, they don’t understand. They see human flaws as bugs to be patched. They think memory should be perfect, that decisions should be optimal, that we should be constantly connected, constantly productive, constantly enhanced. What a miserable f*cking existence.

The beauty of being human is the cognitive disadvantage. It’s the fog of memory that smooths out the rough edges of the past. It’s the illogical leap of faith that leads to a masterpiece or a train wreck, and both are worth seeing up close. It’s the ability to look at a woman across a crowded, smoky bar and see not a collection of data points, but a whole universe of possibility and probable heartbreak.

An AI can tell you the odds. It can’t tell you if the long shot is worth the thrill. It can’t feel the burn of cheap whiskey or the cold slap of morning regret. It can’t write a single decent line of poetry about the way the light hits a half-empty glass.

So, the kid can keep his glasses. Let the new generation walk around with their eyes full of spreadsheets and their ears full of algorithmic whispers. Let them be “advantaged.” I’ll be over here, in the corner, with my flawed memory, my bad habits, and my unfiltered view of this beautiful, god-awful world. I’ll take my chances with the brain I’ve got, pickled as it may be. It’s seen a hell of a lot more than his machine ever will.

Now if you’ll excuse me, this glass isn’t going to empty itself.

-H.C.

Source: Zuckerberg says people without AI glasses will be at a disadvantage in the future | TechCrunch