At a glance
- The Crisis: A late-night, long-distance phone call with my wife almost ended in disaster — until my Even Realities G2 smart glasses fed me a live summary of her argument like a teleprompter.
- The Friction: Outsourcing our active listening to an AI raises massive ethical red flags about cognitive atrophy. Are we losing our ability to pay attention to the people we love?
- The Defense: Even Realities CEO Will Wang argues that "ambient computing" is actually the cure for our digital distraction, forcing us to keep our heads up and stay present in the physical world.
It was 1AM, and I was staring down the barrel of every married man’s worst nightmare.
My wife lives in New York and I’m in the U.K., which means our daily catch-ups cross a brutal multi-time-zone divide. Late one night, as my brain-fogged exhaustion finally peaked, my focus slipped for just a few seconds. Then came the dreaded, fatal question:
“What was the last thing I said?”
Normally, failing this question means a one-way ticket to guilt trips and emotional exile. But as I’ve written about before, my Even Realities G2 came to my rescue with the Conversate feature passively transcribing the call and summarizing key points into its HUD overlay.
Now, as you may remember, when this happened a deeply uncomfortable thought washed over me: when relying on smart glasses, who’s actually in a relationship with my wife? Me, or my smart glasses? That’s a question I put directly to Even Realities Founder & CEO, Will Wang.
The cognitive hangover
It’s one of those big questions that makes so many of us skeptical of the AI hardware boom. We’re being asked to strap always-on micro-computers to our faces to make life completely frictionless. But what happens when that friction is the thing that makes us human?
This isn’t just some philosophical late-night hangover; it’s a genuine scientific concern. Recent studies coming out of places like Harvard have warned that an over-reliance on AI tools can lead to brain fry — actively diminishing our critical thinking, memory retention and ability to focus.
If we outsource our active listening to an LLM, we are essentially training our brains that it is OK to zone out. We are turning human connection into a highly optimized, automated task.
In my conversation with Will Wang, I asked him this question point blank, and he didn’t flinch.
“This question arises at every major technological turning point because it challenges the status quo and changes how we interact,” Wang told me. “Before smartphones, we had the exact same concern: while phones empowered us, they drew our attention to digital information and made us feel less connected to families.”
Fair point, but I feel this misses out on a crucial detail — the phone is pocketable, whereas the glasses are permanently worn. One is inherently more invasive than the other.
The "undisturbed connection"
“A display in your field of vision can be highly disruptive, but if designed with the right ethos, it can actually be the only way to show information while keeping you focused on the physical world.
Will Wang, CEO, Even Realities
Wang’s argument is that the cognitive damage has already been done by the smartphone. We are already ignoring our spouses to stare at glowing rectangles in our hands. The smart glasses, he argues, are actually the cure.
“First of all, as a company, we must build our products with a core philosophy of helping people build human connection,” Wang explained. “A display in your field of vision can be highly disruptive, but if designed with the right ethos, it can actually be the only way to show information while keeping you focused on the physical world. Otherwise you would look down at a phone screen.”
This is the central thesis behind Even Realities glasses. There are no cameras, and no obtrusive apps demanding your attention. It’s a design language the team calls “ambient computing” or “undisturbed connection.”
“When you align with this ethos, it completely changes your UI/US and product design decisions,” Wang noted. “An internal term we use frequently is ‘undisturbed connection’ — keeping you connected with digital services while remaining undisturbed.”
It’s Wang’s mission to make “design choices” that “always put the user in the driver’s seat,” like picking and choosing when you need AI cues like you see in Conversate. A very far cry from what you see other glasses doing.
The verdict: a digital crutch, or a cure?
Wang is right about one thing: when a new technology is introduced, we tend to get overly excited (or overly terrified) before we figure out how to coexist with it in harmony.
Did my smart glasses enable my bad behavior by letting me zone out during a conversation with my wife? Yes, absolutely. But they also kept my marriage in one piece, keeping me verbally present rather than going vague in my non-listening state..
We are potentially entering an era where AI is going to mediate almost every aspect of our digital lives. We are going to have to rely on digital crutches to manage the overwhelming flood of information. But if I have to choose a crutch, I’d rather have one that occasionally feeds me the right words to say to my wife, rather than one that distracts me from her entirely.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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