Noam Chomsky on Google Glass: Orwellian (Excerpt)

What do the threat to Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the NSA spying scandal have in common? Find out in the full interview at GRITtv.org.

[@TakishidoKamen9193]

I support people who punch Google Glass users. If you wanna create a nightmarish dystopia, you deserve at least a punch in the face.

[@shway1]

4 years after this comment people began debating if we should even punch nazis

[@salasvalor01]

The thing is, one class isn't going to make or break people. The way education is set up anyway isn't to educate, but to spit out information and forget it.

[@ChantMediaOrg]

Actually what he said was being on the internet 24 hours a day destroys people.

[@radiosant]

having to moderate one's behavior and being completely robbed of ones individuality are not remotely comparable, and we are certainly headed toward the latter.

[@salasvalor01]

I study Hitchens' interviews and he was like Jay Gatsby and a wicked polemicist, and an elite. He was anti-totalitarian, just like Chomsky, but Hitchens handled it differently. He held a polymathic store of facts in his head and always eloquent and honest. These traits never left him, and according to his dearest friends at his death, not until the last five minutes or so. He was writing a couple new essays during his death. Just amazing. It's who they were vs recent them, is what I was about.

[@HughMorristheJoker]

Hitchens was great but no one held or holds more facts in their head than Chomsky. Maybe Umberto Eco (also dead).

[@astormridr]

Chomsky has a way of making me rethink everything I thought I knew after hearing his opinions on the matter.

[@salasvalor01]

MIT is the most prominent technological university and Chomsky has been a professor there for over half a century. I'm surprised he is concerned about Glass.

[@astormridr]

Chomsky has a way of saying things that make me rethink everything I thought I knew.

[@FreeUsAllNowGod]

Things like collecting massive real-time data on millions of Americans and handing it over to the NSA?

[@Vinco]

i'm going into my fourth for mechanical engineering at NJIT, rankings be damned (sadly, we've been in the top 10, maybe 5 least happiest students). for engineers, an ethics class is required, and just from asking my other friends, for their majors as well. if some lowly school like mine requires ethics classes, and MIT doesn't, either you're wrong and they do have an ethics class, or they don't and something's stupid in the world.

[@salasvalor01]

If you didn't read my first comment, I see glass as a trinket in contrast to anything else an MIT student could bring to the table. If Chomsky would object to something as small as glass, I wonder why he hangs around MIT itself, the greatest technological institution on the planet.

[@salasvalor01]

Thanks..

[@ClayMann]

Remember he's 84 years old now. I'd of liked him to clarify a bit more what he means. I suspect he's really thinking about a bigger issue about people being tracked everywhere and Glass is just the most front facing product that's related to that right now.

[@gunkwretch102]

You notice how no one can remember phone numbers now that we have cell phones? Imagine what will happen with "augmented reality" and computers telling us everything, we will become completely dependent on technology

[@salasvalor01]

We are literally always a different person than the person just an instant ago (that is now someone or something else). If you're looking for someone to meet a set of predefined qualities, you'll be looking for eternity. Isn't it incredible how a million good deeds doesn't outweigh 1 bad one? People should re-evaluate their morality. Science is doing this, but at slow pace.

[@rebeccascheckman9402]

Hey- if you are interested in seeing the whole interview you can go to GRITtv.org This was just a small part and he gets at a bigger issue! R

[@rebeccascheckman9402]

If you are curious about the whole conversation you should check out the full interview. This video is just a small part of how Noam sees the bigger picture: grittv.org has the full interview!

[@floppykid]

Yes, but other people can walk down the street with google glass, recording you with an ease we haven't really seen before. They'll be facial recognition software for it to before you know it.

[@tarantism]

ask yourself if we are better off than the natives of the past. we work more, are stressed out, oppressed, repressed, diseased and unhealthy without any sort of feeling of significance or natural wisdom. we also have created a great imbalance environmentally and socially that can only be seen rationally as insane

[@salasvalor01]

My university is a subset of Purdue University which is in the top 20 universities in I think the world, yet I can tell you halfway through a bachelor's degree we have not been taught anything how to be ethical with technology, nor would I expect that. So, I do not trust MIT taught anyone about taking morally beneficial choices because that isn't what universities do. It's easy to say "education will handle it" but 4 years is not near enough time to compress all you could conjure for it.

[@TheToltec]

Awesome Commentary..

[@Vinco]

no shit, college doesn't prepare people for the real world. but if we're gonna learn a life-long profession in four years, we damn well gotta learn it as well as we can. here's a simple case: should i make something as an engineer, it's my fault if i fudge the numbers and something goes wrong. it would be damn stupid if MIT doesn't promote something as simple as that. and one of noam chomsky's listed interests on wikipedia is ethics. it wouldn't surprise me if he taught those classes himself.

[@RAMSEY1987]

Oh Prof Chomsky

[@iBishopEsquire]

Are people in this chat really trying to compare Hitchens with Chomsky as a thinker. Not even close. The old timer has always been much more lucid than Hitchens.

[@Vinco]

a student could, but google has. that's the difference, to me. a student can discover something, but the potential for harm depends on the nature of what it was that was discovered. we trust that MIT taught the individual to take the morally beneficial choice should they independently choose to do something with it, but if we don't give them that freedom to explore, we limit and prohibit what the mind and humanity can learn and discover and know. because it's technology doesn't mean it's bad.

[@salasvalor01]

You missed the reference.

[@STalvacchia]

You must not have googled what I said. Hitchens died relatively young, so his wit, eloguence, and polymathic store of facts not fading is nothing surprising. But his views took a turn during the war on terror and I'm not sure I would label him "anti-totalitarian".. more along the lines of "anti-islamic". He said a number of misleading and deeply disturbing things. I'm not going to quote, google the article and give it a read.

[@FreeUsAllNowGod]

What is Google glass capable of doing?

[@salasvalor01]

top 20 for computer science.

[@ClayMann]

Pretty much my thoughts exactly except I think he's alluding to where the technology is going rather than speaking about just Google Glass. The battery life just isn't there to use it like that but that's going to change. Me personally I love the idea of augmented reality helping me work out whose peoples names are and the potential of what that does for us but there's no doubt the gov and companies are going to mine the crap out of that data. I don't think you can have it and privacy.

[@EMPtea-aye]

Okay...privacy IS fading away, does that have to ALL bad? Is it not a good thing to have to moderate our behavior towards acting less violent and less angry in public? Can't I be happy about having a tool that weeds out the dishonest mechanics? Can't some of us enjoy these tools without feeling guilty about? I say less crime and more transparency in the areas that matter seem like a reasonable trade off for getting caught in the occasional nose pick.

[@mrKreuzfeld]

you can chose to not wear the glasses is just my point

[@cerimccoy]

Thank god for Edward Snowden and all of us think this sort of world is bad for the children of the future: 4legs good 2legs better NO BRAIN BEST!!! Lets try and break the bast*rds while we've still got a chance.

I truly admire Chomsky for his political ideas (Anarcho-syndicalism, for instance), but in this 1:30 min. video he doesn't seem to know very well what Google Glass is capable of doing. I'd like very much to know why he thinks Glass destroys people.

[@salasvalor01]

Yeah, that's probably it, that is pretty fucking old for his generation. It's consistent with all the other amazing qualities I've seen of him, because I know him as a polymath and a super-intellectual- an intellectual to intellectuals.

[@STalvacchia]

His speaking may be slower, but no less profound. His words are carefully chosen and poignant. This is a short clip, but I'm sure if pressed, he would have plenty to say about it. I certainly don't think Glass is just a trinket. If it goes they way cell phones have, there'll be irresistible advantages, but also irresistible tracking by the Gov. I assume by "people", he means individuality, just as many discuss FB (and the like) doing now. Think of what he warns in manufacturing consent.

[@2DRonaldo]

Yeah cause using CAPS LOCKS WILL GET YOUR POINT ACROSS!!!

[@ClayMann]

You summed up nicely what I was thinking.

[@stevemacbr]

OVER 13,000 VIEWS,.... AND ONLY ---- 122 ---- LIKES ??? . WHAT'S UP SHEEPLE..??... DON'T YOU SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL ??? . GET PUSHING THE LIKE SYMBOL

[@FreeUsAllNowGod]

And where does the data travelling on the fibre optic cables come from?

[@hotstixx]

"desert of the real".

[@salasvalor01]

It shocked me. It seemed he took an extreme stance on something I felt would be trivial to him (he's a professor at MIT) and went as far as to say it destroys people. Little do I think people know Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky bumped shoulders and became allies, then split because of indifference. Chomsky being old and his talking so slow in comparison to his younger days, perhaps Hitchens was right when he said he didn't think Chomsky was as up to it anymore as he was when younger.

[@mrKreuzfeld]

IMO: it is not an invasion of privacy, because it is not an invasion. you have a choice to wear the glasses. As long as they are upfront with what is reccorded, where it is stored and the glasses is something you can live without (notice cellphones is something you cant live without IMO), then it is not an invasion.

[@MrTokinedz]

The Matrix is coming!

[@KRUSTYskates]

Microsoft/Google: Xbox1/Glass

[@Vinco]

yes, moreso than google glass. people who would buy xbox one would simply be foolish. people who would buy google glass would be foolish aaaand rich, and there's certainly less fools with money than plain old fools.

[@AntiCorp65]

Welcome to 1984.

[@joshuaoha]

Google glasses and augmented reality will eventually change things dramatically whether we like it or not. It is unavoidable.... It is kinda scary, but I'm also really curious what all the implications will be. I usually agree with Chomsky. But not this time.

[@prithvib8662]

Love it when Chomsky talks about things he doesn't understand. Smartphones have cameras. Chomsky: "LITERALLY 1984"

[@shway1]

smartphones are in your pocket

[@prithvib8662]

@@shway1 oh no, I might take it out and snap a pic, like literally everyone does.

[@shway1]

@@prithvib8662 having everyone constantly walking around with a camera strapped to their head is a serious problem, and so are self driving cars covered in sensors.

[@prithvib8662]

@@shway1 I can definitely see the potential for abuse but Chomsky's view seems to be that because it can be abused, it shouldn't happen. The reality is you can't have self-driving cars that aren't covered in sensors. Perception needs a lot of hardware. You could instead build in standardized hardware to address security and privacy concerns, much like the industry has already done for so many technologies that used to face criticisms like the ones put forth by Chomsky.

[@shway1]

@@prithvib8662 can't solve the problem without first making people aware of it, especially when economic interests are not in favor of privacy

[@floppykid]

That's a lot of trust you have for Google there bro.

[@the81kid]

Yeah. Back to your iPod. Back to your FarmVille. Zzzzzz.

[@salasvalor01]

Xbox One anybody?

[@AZURA888]

Chomsky stop of being so hipster, seriously, you are still alive thanks to the industrial world, go to North Korea to live as a north korean then, you wouldn't last 48 hours there.

[@Imhornydadcomeinside]

Find me a quote were Noam Chomsky described NK or even Soviet as a model to follow.

[@Zatzzo]

are you trying to say you're absolutely 100% satisfied with everything that is going on in the "industrial world"?