Companies like Meta intentionally equate devices like smart glasses with smartphones. This framing sidesteps the need to develop new social rules for passive recording, which is fundamentally different from the overt action of holding up a phone to record.
Despite a company's intended use and initial communication, mass adoption means users will invent new applications. These emergent behaviors, both positive (like Twitter's hashtags) and negative (harassment with Meta Glasses), ultimately define the product and its next iteration.
Meta faces public and legal backlash for researching and reporting on safety issues on its platforms. This "transparency penalty" disincentivizes proactive safety research, as competitors who remain silent on their platforms' issues face far less criticism.
Mark Zuckerberg frames teen safety as a prisoner's dilemma requiring government intervention to force competitors like TikTok to adopt similar standards. Conversely, he argues the market will self-correct for AI safety, revealing a strategic, rather than principled, approach to regulation.
Mark Zuckerberg's strategy for Muse is to aggregate consumer demand and charge businesses a transaction fee for access. This is ironic given his public frustration and strategic moves to escape being a downstream business subject to Apple's App Store rules and 30% tax.
Products like Instagram are so beloved for entertainment that users tend to overlook their downstream harms. It's unclear if utility-focused AI, like Meta's Muse for business, can ever achieve a similar level of adoration to justify its significant societal and environmental costs, such as data centers.