The Weekly Flail - October 5, 2024
OVERVIEW
Our climate disaster solutions, such as they are, will never solve our problems. However, those solutions are beginning to have consequences, and those are not always what was planned.
The officially defined and outlined Climate Disaster is far worse and faster than expected. It is also becoming evident that the effort to minimize climate disasters using a slow model with minimal ratios between equatorial and polar heating was wrong. The ratio is not 2:1 but more like 4:1, with polar heating at least four times faster than the rest of the planet. This has growing consequences, but like everything else, it is politicized now. Facts no longer matter to the fascist wave, and they will eventually become violent.
China is the world leader in EVs, but the American Empire will not allow domestic access to them to save the old-fashioned domestic manufacturers. China is also facing the issue of the rapid growth of wind and solar power disrupting large electric grids. This is not surprising, but massive grid-level battery storage is required to stabilize the situation, and that slows things down.
AI is both a failure and a huge success, depending on who you listen to. The new OpenAI thinking systems may or may not ‘think’ depending on how you define that word. Nuclear plants are being restarted (Three Mile Island) to power AI data centers for Microsoft, and others will follow.
At the same time, development has become focused on smaller LLMs with more efficient functioning that do not require massive server farms to process.
HINT: all of these things are true but not contradictory. We are experiencing the largest paradigm change in history with AI, but people are failing at managing complexity. We need to get out of the way of our intelligent systems, and, no, they will not take over and dispense with us.
WAR
Sorting out the propaganda and lies has been and continues to be a growing problem. Within the American Empire, we are dealing with the huge mistake of supporting the Zionist regime in Israel. What had been years of support for Jewish sovereignty in response to centuries of antisemitism evolved into neofascist support for white supremacy and a new apartheid, becoming a new genocide against the Palestinian people as their homeland was stolen.
The US election is too much of a disaster to be able to handle the Middle East disaster that we created in the wake of the British and French mismanagement. So, we support ethnic cleansing, which is now genocide, to avoid admitting any errors.
Whatever the answer, the two-state solution is dead, and we are dependent on Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinians to keep Netanyahu and his ilk from blowing up half the planet.
news.gallup.com
Palestinians See U.S. Response to Gaza as Failure
October 3, 2024
In surveys conducted in July and August, Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were asked to what extent they agree that “the U.S. has made acceptable efforts to push for the safeguarding of civilians in Gaza.” Seven in 10 Palestinians surveyed (69%) strongly disagree, while 76% disagree overall. About one in 10 (11%) agree that the U.S. has done enough to protect civilians.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gazans, including via a now dismantled floating pier the U.S. military completed in May, Palestinians view these efforts only slightly more favorably. Asked if the U.S. has done enough to ensure that Palestinians in Gaza receive humanitarian aid, 71% disagree, including 58% who strongly disagree.
A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report released roughly at the same time as the survey showed that more than 1 million in southern and central Gaza received no rations at all.
Palestinians Dissatisfied With U.S. Humanitarian Efforts
To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?
The U.S. has made acceptable efforts to push for the safeguarding of civilians in Gaza.
The U.S. has made acceptable efforts to ensure Palestinians in Gaza receive humanitarian aid.
The results of West Bank and East Jerusalem from a survey conducted July 7-Aug. 10, 2024. To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? The U.S. has made acceptable efforts to push for the safeguarding of civilians in Gaza.
The U.S. has made acceptable efforts to ensure Palestinians in Gaza receive humanitarian aid.
For Push for the Safeguarding of Civilians, 69% strongly disagree.
For Ensure Palestinians receive aid, 58% strongly disagree.
Palestinians Believe U.S. Can Significantly Influence Israeli Policies
Two in three Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (68%) agree with the statement that “the U.S. has the ability to significantly influence Israeli government policies,” including 54% who strongly agree.
Further, 70% believe the U.S. holds significant influence over Israeli military operations, including 57% who strongly agree. Fewer than one in five Palestinians in the two territories surveyed disagree to some extent that the U.S. has major influence over Israeli policies (18%) or military operations (18%).
That the U.S. has not been able to negotiate a permanent ceasefire in the conflict, despite its influence, is likely only compounding Palestinians’ frustration with the U.S. for not doing more to safeguard civilians or the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Record Few Approve of U.S. Leadership
Amid this context, Palestinian views of U.S. leadership -- which were already poor -- have hit rock bottom. Just 5% of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now approve of U.S. leadership, the lowest in Gallup’s annual trend dating back to 2006. The 88% of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who disapprove of U.S. leadership marks a new high.
Since 2006, Palestinians in these two areas have been among the bottom six of 140 countries or areas each year for U.S. approval. And Palestinians’ 5% approval of the U.S. in 2024 ranks among the 10 lowest U.S. approval ratings that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in nearly two decades.
[EMPHASIS ADDED]
Iran Missile Strikes Into Israel Reconfirm Lack of Meaningful Defenses; Lebanon Invasion So Far Not Going Much of Anywhere
Yves Smith October 2, 2024
We are once again in a situation where the information about the conflict between the Resistance and Israel is polluted by propaganda, important omissions as well some observers getting ahead of themselves. Even with Iran missile strikes into Iran having occurred yesterday, the reporting is still sketchy, admittedly in no small measure due to Israel’s attempt to impose a blackout.
However, some things do appear to be known:
Israel air defenses again failed. This is a bigger re-run of what happened in April, when Iran agreed to what Israel and its allies thought would be Potemkin retaliation for Israel striking the Iran embassy compound in Damascus. Even with Israel having ideal circumstances, targets agreed in advance, having support from the US, UK and France, Iran sending slow-moving drones with a six hour flight time first and even broadcasting the launch on state TV, Iran hit every target with great accuracy. And the cost of the strikes was $90 million-ish for Iran, while the defense cost for Israel was IIRC $1.35 billion, and another $1 billion for Israel’s allies.1
Iran fired 200 to 400 missiles. The Navy said it downed only about a dozen missiles.2 We had this tweet in Links but it’s worth highlighting:
🇮🇱🇮🇷 15 minutes Iranian missiles hitting Israel … supercut pic.twitter.com/OABH2cWfb4
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) October 1, 2024
The level of damage is not clear and in any event, Iran may have been more interested in a show of force. Pathologically, pro-Israel sources are treating the lack of any deaths as proof that Iran was still showing restraint and trying to avoid casualties. Iran reportedly hit three airbases, Nevidim, Telnov, and Hatserim, and also struck close to the Mossad Unit 8200 building. There were also unconfirmed videos on Twitter showing missiles striking Israel offshore gas operations, which provide 80% of Israel’s gas, and an oil tankers.
. . . .
Politico reported that Israel had persuaded the White House to go along with the obviously lunatic idea of attacking Lebanon to coerce it to enter into negotiations. Since Amos Hochstein was part of this scheme, it isn’t hard to imagine, as usual, that he was operating to advance Israel as opposed to US interests. And Netanyahu has been keen to get the US more deeply committed to defending Israel, so any way to get the US to go along with escalation was ducky for him.
Mind you, even though a bigger mess in Israel puts the Democratic party keeping the Presidency at risk (is Madame Joy Vibes a credible war leader?), the White House went ahead over objections from the Pentagon, State and the intel agencies. This should have been plenty of cause for pause; since when has Anthony Blinken refrained from being Israel’s chief enabler?
The US and Israel over-estimated how much damage they had actually done to Hezbollah, despite killing most of its top cadre. It still has an estimated 150,000 missiles. How much in the way of leadership does it take to assign targets and fire? This was a point made by John Mearsheimer in an interview with the Spectator: Hezbollah was obviously not defeated after Israel killed Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah figures because Hezbollah was still firing on Israel. Operationally, nothing important to Israel had changed.
Norman Finkelstein more recently made a similar point: that the claim by Israel that it needed to get Hezbollah to pull back past the Litani River so the settlers in northern Israel could go home was clearly bogus. Hezbollah was firing on them from much further north in Lebanon. The demand was about securing concessions, importantly territorial, from Hezbollah to show Israel had scored a win. . .
Clarity After Iran Strike, as Israel Tries to Pivot to Nuclear Arc
Simplicius October 3, 2024
Two days out from Iran’s seminal strike on Israel and some things are being clarified.
All the early claims of having shot everything down were slowly retracted, with more realistic headlines slowly taking their place as testament to the confusion behind the scenes.
Iranian missiles were able to overcome Israel's multi-layered air defense, writes the magazine "Der Spiegel". The publication notes that this time the missile attack was significantly more successful than the previous one in April, when Israel and its allies still managed to intercept 99 percent of Iranian missiles and drones. "They probably learned from the April attacks and chose ballistic missiles this time," says military expert Fabian Hinz of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Videos like this one are hard to deny—watch the end to see major explosions at the site of whatever was hit:
Alleged to be outside of Nevatim base:
We’ve finally got some BDAs of the hits, though they do present uncertainty as to Iran’s true objectives.
Here’s a news report confirming one of the missiles landed outside the Mossad HQ:
But was it a miss, or a deliberate “message” sent?
There are two camps now: one claiming Iran cannot hit anything, the other that Iran deliberately avoided causing too much damage. There is some evidence for both. . . .
CLIMATE DISASTER
Helene hit the town that mines most of the world’s high-purity quartz, threatening the chip industry’s supply
Sifting through the wreckage… Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida last Thursday, and the storm’s destruction is only starting to come into focus. As of yesterday there were 183 confirmed deaths, and estimates put economic losses at up to $110B. And while Helene’s damage has been widespread, severe flooding in the small town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, has affected one unexpected industry: semiconductors.
* Not just clocks: High-purity quartz is key to the production of chips used in a variety of tech, including AI, smartphones, and cars.
* Small town, big supplier: 80 to 90% of the world’s supply of high-purity quartz comes from Spruce Pine.
Major miner problem… Sibelco and the Quartz Corp., high-purity-quartz mine operators in Spruce Pine, said they shut down ahead of Helene and were unsure when they’d reopen. That could create a supply problem for the tech industry, which has been racing to scoop up chips. In July alone, global semiconductor industry sales hit $51.3B — up nearly 19% on the year. Before Helene, the quartz-mining business was booming along with demand for AI chips. Last year Sibelco announced a $200M investment to double its mining capacity in the town.
Chokepoints can become breaking points… With the semiconductor industry relying on Spruce Pine’s quartz mines, the shutdown could affect the entire tech industry. It’s happened before: in 2008, a fire at a Spruce Pine quartz refinery disrupted the global supply. At least one expert said consumers could see the price of electronics pop after Helene.
NOTE: As we know, the pandemic continues to evolve. The political effort to ignore it is wearing very thin.
XEK ( XEC and KP.2.3 Recombinant Variant)
TACT
XEK is an XEC and KP.2.3 recombinant variant. In less than 2 months, 3 different variants were able to recombine to create one new variant, which happens to have the greatest growth advantage at this time. The first thing this tells us is that more people are being infected with more than one variant at a time. In the simplest terms, that’s very bad for your health. This is also allowing for more opportunities for the virus to evolve. The faster it evolves, the less likely prior immune responses to earlier variants, or that induced from vaccines, will be effective. It’s also making it less likely that other treatments, like Paxlovid or monoclonal antibodies, will be effective.
The CDC and the other public health agencies around the world that followed the CDC’s unscientific guidance to allow people to return to school or work after being fever-free for 24 hours when most people are still at peak levels of contagiousness, not only puts everyone’s health in jeopardy, it aids the viruses evolution, which allows it to overcome our immune system and the treatments designed to aid the immune response or slow down the virus.
Xu Zou-
https://x.com/xz_keg/status/1840242117748334978?t=OUApusQHt8IGAQRU2_Rk8A&s=19
XEK has been found in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Due to the delays in sequencing, we can assume that it has spread much further than this already.
What did XEK gain over XEC that could explain an advantage?
This is where it gets even more concerning. Unlike many earlier variants, there aren’t any changes in the Spike protein. This could very well be a reflection of a world with much less influence from the vaccines, which target the Spike protein. The virus didn’t have any selective pressure to alter the mutations in the spike, but it continues to have pressure from the innate immune system. A strong mucosal response and T-cell response is what is keeping many people from becoming symptomatically infected.
We discussed in the last update, how XEC may be better at avoiding these responses. It appears that XEK may have gotten just a little better at it than XEC. Keep in mind this is still an early assessment. XEC is fairly well established at this point and will very likely become dominant sometime in mid-November. XEK is gaining enough ground, now found across Europe and a few sequences in the U.S. There haven’t been any found in Canada or Australia, yet. We know that if it isn’t there now, it will be very soon.
T.A.C.T. is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
XEC and XEK are recombinant variants of SARS-CoV-2 that are very similar and only differ in a few nucleotide mutations and associated ORF1a proteins, which could influence the virus's fitness, transmissibility, and immune evasion capabilities. There isn't any change in the Spike protein. . . .
TECHNOLOGY
These Mini AI Models Match OpenAI With 1,000 Times Less Data
Jason Dorrier October 4, 2024
The artificial intelligence industry is obsessed with size. Bigger algorithms. More data. Sprawling data centers that could, in a few years, consume enough electricity to power whole cities.
This insatiable appetite is why OpenAI—which is on track to make $3.7 billion in revenue but lose $5 billion this year—just announced it’s raised $6.6 billion more in funding and opened a line of credit for another $4 billion.
Eye-popping numbers like these make it easy to forget size isn’t everything.
Some researchers, particularly those with fewer resources, are aiming to do more with less. AI scaling will continue, but those algorithms will also get far more efficient as they grow.
Last week, researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) released a new family of open-source multimodal models competitive with state-of-the-art models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o—but an order of magnitude smaller. Called Molmo, the models range from 1 billion to 72 billion parameters. GPT-4o, by comparison, is estimated to top a trillion parameters.
It’s All in the Data
Ai2 said it accomplished this feat by focusing on data quality over quantity.
Algorithms fed billions of examples, like GPT-4o, are impressively capable. But they also ingest a ton of low-quality information. All this noise consumes precious computing power.
To build their new multimodal models, Ai2 assembled a backbone of existing large language models and vision encoders. They then compiled a more focused, higher quality dataset of around 700,000 images and 1.3 million captions to train new models with visual capabilities. That may sound like a lot, but it’s on the order of 1,000 times less data than what’s used in proprietary multimodal models.
Instead of writing captions, the team asked annotators to record 60- to 90-second verbal descriptions answering a list of questions about each image. They then transcribed the descriptions—which often stretched across several pages—and used other large language models to clean up, crunch down, and standardize them. They found that this simple switch, from written to verbal annotation, yielded far more detail with little extra effort.
Tiny Models, Top Dogs
The results are impressive.
According to a technical paper describing the work, the team’s largest model, Molmo 72B, roughly matches or outperforms state-of-the-art closed models—including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro—across a range of 11 academic benchmarks as well as by user preference. Even the smaller Molmo models, which are a tenth the size of its biggest, compare favorably to state-of-the-art models.
Molmo can also point to the things it identifies in images. This kind of skill might help developers build AI agents that identify buttons or fields on a webpage to handle tasks like making a reservation at a restaurant. Or it could help robots better identify and interact with objects in the real world.
Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi acknowledged it’s debatable how much benchmarks can tell us. But we can use them to make a rough model-to-model comparison.
“There are a dozen different benchmarks that people evaluate on. I don’t like this game, scientifically… but I had to show people a number,” Farhadi said at a Seattle release event. “Our biggest model is a small model, 72B, it’s outperforming GPTs and Claudes and Geminis on those benchmarks. Again, take it with a grain of salt; does this mean that this is really better than them or not? I don’t know. But at least to us, it means that this is playing the same game.”
Open-Source AI
In addition to being smaller, Molmo is open-source. This matters because it means people now have a free alternative to proprietary models.
There are other open models that are beginning to compete with the top dogs on some marks. Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, for example, is the first scaled up open-weights large language model. But it’s not multimodal. (Meta released multimodal versions of its smaller Llama models last week. It may do the same for its biggest model in the months to come.)
Molmo is also more open than Llama. Meta’s models are best described as “open-weights” models, in that the company releases model weights but not the code or data used in training. The biggest Molmo model is based on Alibaba Cloud’s open-weights Qwen2 72B—which, like Llama, doesn’t include training data or code—but Ai2 did release the dataset and code they used to make their model multimodal.
Also, Meta limits commercial use to products with under 700 million users. In contrast, Molmo carries an Apache 2.0 license. This means developers can modify the models and commercialize products with few limitations.
“We’re targeting, researchers, developers, app developers, people who don’t know how to deal with these [large] models. A key principle in targeting such a wide range of audience is the key principle that we’ve been pushing for a while, which is: make it more accessible,” Farhadi said.
Nipping at the Heels
There are a few things of note here. First, while the makers of proprietary models try to monetize their models, open-source alternatives with similar capabilities are arriving. These alternatives, as Molmo shows, are also smaller, meaning they can run locally, and more flexible. They’re legitimate competition for companies raising billions on the promise of AI products.
“Having an open source, multimodal model means that any startup or researcher that has an idea can try to do it,” Ofir Press, a post-doc at Princeton University, told Wired.
At the same time, working with images and text is old hat for OpenAI and Google. The companies are pulling ahead again by adding advanced voice capabilities, video generation, and reasoning skills. With billions in new investment and access to a growing horde of quality data from deals with publishers, the next generation of models could raise the stakes again.
Still, Molmo suggests that even as the biggest companies plow billions into scaling the technology, open-source alternatives may not be far behind.
China's Energy Grid Overwhelmed by Renewable Surge
Haley Zaremba October 2, 2024
Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the…
* China's massive wind and solar energy capacity additions are straining the energy grid, prompting a shift in focus towards energy storage solutions.
* Energy storage technologies, particularly battery storage, are crucial for balancing the grid, mitigating market volatility, and ensuring the effective use of renewable energy.
* China's energy storage market is expected to experience significant growth, driven by the need to support the country's renewable energy ambitions and achieve zero-emissions targets.
China is building twice as much wind and solar energy production capacity as the rest of the entire world combined. [Emphasis added} While this runaway expansion is great news for the country’s decarbonization goals, it is putting strain on energy grids and energy markets, even leading to occasional negative energy prices in some areas. Chinese grid officials are reportedly decreasing output from turbines and solar panels this year to avoid overwhelming power lines.
“With annual wind and solar installations booming and potentially allowing for an early peak in emissions in the world’s biggest polluter, the focus has shifted from generating clean energy to making sure it can be used,” Bloomberg recently reported. In order to more effectively support these massive renewable energy additions, China is getting serious about energy storage, which is heating up to be a major market in the coming months and years.
Solar and wind power are variable energy sources, meaning that their power production levels fluctuate according to the weather, time of day, and the seasons in ways that are not always predictable. This presents challenges to balancing inflows and outflows of energy to the grid, as wind and solar production cannot be manipulated to match energy demand, unlike energy derived from fossil fuels.
This is where energy storage comes in. Storage technologies capture and stockpile excess energy when renewable energy supply outstrips demand, and later feed that energy back into the grid when demand outstrips supply. This stabilizes inflows and outflows to the grid while also mitigating market volatility through a process known as arbitrage. Due to these essential energy security services, it has been argued that energy storage is the backbone of the renewable revolution.
As of July 2024 analysis from Global Energy Monitor, China was developing 180 gigawatts of large solar projects and 159 gigawatts of large wind projects. Together, these developments amount to almost two-thirds of the entire world’s incoming wind and solar capacity. But while the country’s combined wind and solar capacity has topped 1,200 gigawatts, installed battery storage capacity has reached just 44 gigawatts.
While battery storage capacity has lagged far behind renewable energy capacity additions, China’s energy storage is on a massive growth trajectory. Installed capacity already grew by 40% in the first half of 2024, and is expected to reach 300 gigawatts of battery storage by 2030, according to Qian Zhimin, former chairman of the Chinese mega-utility State Power Investment Corp.
Energy storage is a nascent sector and many energy storage technologies are still in the research and development phase. Batteries are just one option, and they have some distinct disadvantages, as they are only able to hold power for short time periods. However, the market is currently dominated by lithium-ion battery storage, as it is a proven technology with plenty of existing infrastructure, well-established supply chains, relatively low-cost installation, and, as luck would have it, a current surplus of manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that “battery makers have over-invested in factories in recent years, leaving the industry with massive overcapacity.”
The explosive growth of the energy storage sector is therefore great news for the battery industry. To reach zero-emissions targets, it is estimated that worldwide installed battery storage capacity needs to grow to more than a terawatt (TW) by 2030, and nearly 5TW by 2050. For context, total capacity totalled less than 200 gigawatts (GW) in 2023.
China is not the only place that energy storage is taking off. Markets for energy storage are growing at a rapid clip in the United States and Europe as well. On a global scale, energy storage is heating up to be “clean energy’s next trillion-dollar business.” But nowhere is this buildout as important as in China, where warpspeed additions of wind and solar energy production threaten to overwhelm energy grids, undermine national energy security, and potentially even render all of those additions useless.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
Meta has launched the world’s ‘most advanced’ glasses. Will they replace smartphones?
Martie-Louise Verreynne September 29, 2024
Humans are increasingly engaging with wearable technology as it becomes more adaptable and interactive. One of the most intimate ways gaining acceptance is through augmented reality (AR) glasses.
Last week, Meta debuted a prototype of the most recent version of their AR glasses – Orion. They look like reading glasses and use holographic projection to allow users to see graphics projected through transparent lenses into their field of view.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg called Orion “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen”. He said they offer a “glimpse of the future” in which smart glasses will replace smartphones as the main mode of communication.
But is this true or just corporate hype? And will AR glasses actually benefit us in new ways?
Old technology, made new
The technology used to develop Orion glasses is not new.
In the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland introduced the first augmented reality head-mounted display. Two decades later, Canadian engineer and inventor Stephen Mann developed the first glasses-like prototype.
Throughout the 1990s, researchers and technology companies developed the capability of this technology through head-worn displays and wearable computing devices. Like many technological developments, these were often initially focused on military and industry applications.
In 2013, after smartphone technology emerged, Google entered the AR glasses market. But consumers were disinterested, citing concerns about privacy, high cost, limited functionality and a lack of a clear purpose.
This did not discourage other companies – such as Microsoft, Apple and Meta – from developing similar technologies.
Looking inside
Meta cites a range of reasons for why Orion are the world’s most advanced glasses, such as their miniaturised technology with large fields of view and holographic displays. It said these displays provide:
compelling AR experiences, creating new human-computer interaction paradigms […] one of the most difficult challenges our industry has ever faced.
Orion also has an inbuilt smart assistant (Meta AI) to help with tasks through voice commands, eye and hand tracking, and a wristband for swiping, clicking and scrolling.
With these features, it is not difficult to agree that AR glasses are becoming more user-friendly for mass consumption. But gaining widespread consumer acceptance will be challenging.
A set of challenges
Meta will have to address four types of challenges:
1. ease of wearing, using and integrating AR glasses with other glasses
2. physiological aspects such as the heat the glasses generate, comfort and potential vertigo
3. operational factors such as battery life, data security and display quality
4. psychological factors such as social acceptance, trust in privacy and accessibility.
These factors are not unlike what we saw in the 2000s when smartphones gained acceptance. Just like then, there are early adopters who will see more benefits than risks in adopting AR glasses, creating a niche market that will gradually expand.
Similar to what Apple did with the iPhone, Meta will have to build a digital platform and ecosystem around Orion.
This will allow for broader applications in education (for example, virtual classrooms), remote work and enhanced collaboration tools. Already, Orion’s holographic display allows users to overlay digital content and the real world, and because it is hands-free, communication will be more natural.
Creative destruction
Smart glasses are already being used in many industrial settings, such as logistics and healthcare. Meta plans to launch Orion for the general public in 2027.
By that time, AI will have likely advanced to the point where virtual assistants will be able to see what we see and the physical, virtual and artificial will co-exist. At this point, it is easy to see that the need for bulky smartphones may diminish and that through creative destruction, one industry may replace another.
This is supported by research indicating the virtual and augmented reality headset industry will be worth US$370 billion by 2034.
The remaining question is whether this will actually benefit us.
There is already much debate about the effect of smartphone technology on productivity and wellbeing. Some argue that it has benefited us, mainly through increased connectivity, access to information, and productivity applications.
But others say it has just created more work, distractions and mental fatigue.
If Meta has its way, AR glasses will solve this by enhancing productivity. Consulting firm Deloitte agrees, saying the technology will provide hands-free access to data, faster communication and collaboration through data-sharing.
It also claims smart glasses will reduce human errors, enable data visualisation, and monitor the wearer’s health and wellbeing. This will ensure a quality experience, social acceptance, and seamless integration with physical processes.
But whether or not that all comes true will depend on how well companies such as Meta address the many challenges associated with AR glasses.
Until Next Week . . .