Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses | Prize on the Eyes
6/3/202648 min
It’s 2011, and two Stanford students have built eyeglasses with a tiny camera inside. Their a prototype paves the way for Meta Ray-Bans, the first tech-enabled eyewear to truly go mainstream after attempts like Google Glass fizzled. But in integrating their smart glasses into our daily lives, Meta has created something else: a tool for mass surveillance.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Brown· Host0:00
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. [dramatic music] It's 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya. A data labeler clocks in for his shift and lets out a heavy sigh. He does not want to be here this morning. He walks into a large room lined with rows of workers tapping away at computer terminals. [keyboard clicking] He logs in, opens a program, and starts to watch a woman get undressed. She seems totally unaware that anyone might be viewing her, but this data worker can see everything because the video is being streamed live from a pair of Meta glasses sitting on her nightstand, a continent away. The Kenyan man works for a data labeling company called Sama, a corporation that supplies the human labor behind the so-called autonomous machine learning at the heart of AI. Every day, in 10-hour shifts, his job is to review unfiltered video content and label what he sees by drawing bounding boxes around the images on the screen. He draws one box around