I am all about crazy futuristic gadgets, gizmos, and doohickies (feel free to correct my spelling). But I am also all about not living in a world where people are constantly plugged in to some sort of electronic device and eventually become cyborg-people controlled by artificial intelligences that have grown too powerful for us to contain. Okay, maybe that last part was my recent watching of Terminator: Salvation talking, but if you’ve ever watched Transcendent Man (an intriguing and frightening documentary, I highly recommend it) you’ll realize exactly how much is actually a truly possible future for mankind.

My love for sci-fi plotlines means that there’s a small part of me that’s always wary of the mass-production of devices that are meant to “ease our lives.” I mean, if the cavemen survived just fine for thousands of years without an iPhone , do I really need one? What if Siri evolves and decides she doesn’t want to spend her artificial life telling me how to get to Chipotle? (And has anyone noticed that we’re already referring to her as “her”?)

Anyway…

To counter my paranoia, there’s the other part of me that just loves freakin’ cool gadgets! So when I first heard about Google’s Project Glass, my first reaction was to look up all of the really neat things we will be able to do with it. Quick overview: Project Glass is a pair of streamlined glasses that are really a tiny smartphone/supercomputer you wear on your face. The computer shows information as an overlay onto what you’re looking at in real life. Here’s a look at what a day with Google Glasses might be like:

Now, here’s the question: if these glasses go mainstream, what will the consequences be?

Will they become what smartphones have been for the stereotypical teenager — a constant distraction, a perpetual tether to the internet, a seemingly addictive device?

Or will they, as proponents of Google Glasses claim, merely augment our lives? Remove the distraction of physically pulling out a phone to look at a screen, replacing it with a couple of spoken words and an icon at the corner of our eye?

I can see both ways that this could go. In a perfect world (such as the one in the video), we would use these glasses as a supplement to our lives. We would go to work, meet with friends, learn, socialize, and use the glasses only when we needed to get a bite to eat or call someone. But I can also see people sitting on subways and park benches, staring glassy-eyed (bad pun intended) into space and ignoring the people around them as they surf the internet and play through apps (because I’m sure apps will be added at some point).

Of course, this is probably the exact type of commentary that surrounded the first real cell and smart phones, and as a whole we’ve done a reasonably good job of integrating those into our lives. Maybe this is just the next step in that evolution.

I guess (for the Ned’s Declassified fans) if Cookie could manage computer glasses, then we probably can. I just hope they don’t encourage people to walk around talking to themselves. That would just be annoying.