My sunglasses speak to me in the voice of Kristen Bell.
Why? I do not know. It was one of an inexplicable little bouquet of celebrity voices (John Cena, Keegan Michael Key, Awkwafina) that they offered to speak to me in. To be honest, there are many things I don’t understand about my Meta A.I. sunglasses. Why do they exist? Who is their ideal customer? Are they a revolutionary glimpse into humanity’s future or the cringiest possible expression of Mark Zuckerberg’s worst impulses?
Meta’s new gizmos are ordinary-looking Ray-Bans and Oakleys that have been juiced to the gills with hidden technology: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two tiny speakers, five microphones, a wide-angle camera. They are basically a whole sting operation that sits on your nose. Here in 2026, of course, the real selling point is A.I. — an opportunity to chitchat with a disembodied superintelligence that can see and hear everything you do. The glasses, in other words, promise to fulfill one of humanity’s most ancient fantasies: to expand our limited perspective into an all-encompassing, godlike enlightenment.
So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south. One afternoon, on a sunny stroll, I stop to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree.
“Hey, Meta,” I say. “What kind of bird is that chirping in the tree?”
My sunglasses make their little ding-dong noise, analyzing the world. Finally, they speak.
“I don’t see a bird in the tree or hear any chirping,” they say.
I point directly at the bird, which is still chirping.
“I don’t see a bird in the tree where you’re pointing,” my sunglasses say, cheerfully. “Just bare branches and sky.”
For several weeks, this is how it goes — the disorienting sense of chatting with a toddler who is drifting off into naptime.
Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them.
Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.
There were some small pleasures. Fashionwise, these were the nicest sunglasses I’ve ever owned. The little speakers were useful for audiobooks, and the tiny camera captured all kinds of images: the Empire State Building, a blizzard, my son eating a giant pretzel, an older couple holding hands on a sidewalk. When the A.I. successfully identified a John Donne quote (“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”), I felt a surge of fatherly pride. Once, a Cybertruck came rumbling toward me, and as I reached up to snap a picture with my glasses I felt that something momentous was about to happen — that this collision of two notoriously obnoxious technologies might rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and send confetti raining down, and we would all wake up in a new reality where everyone is kind and all leaders are competent and the world’s abundant resources end up where they belong. Instead, the Cybertruck drove on. And my sunglasses were still on my face.
Mostly, my glasses made me sad. Sometimes, people would notice the camera and recoil in horror, hiding their faces, like vampires sprinkled with holy water.
“Hey, Meta,” I said one day. “Tell me a joke.”
“Why did the baseball go to the doctor?” they answered, and I prepared myself for a modest chuckle. Then the punchline came: “It had a little ‘run’ down in its batting average!”
I stood there, for longer than I should have, trying to figure out why that was funny, struggling to accept what I knew in my heart was true.
Obviously, this is not the technology’s final form. Meta reports that seven million people bought its A.I. glasses last year, and as competitors pile on, the product will continue to evolve. But wherever it goes next — smart contact lenses, neural implants, nanobots injected straight into our corneas — the trend is clear. Silicon Valley is in the business of mediation. It wants to insert its products as directly as possible between us and the outside world. It would like our veins to circulate smartphones. But what does it mean for the human mind to be trained, constantly, to ask an external presence for help?
In the end, I decided that the only thing I really wanted my Meta A.I. sunglasses to do was to be sunglasses — i.e. to shade my eyes from the sun. In the future, this is how I plan to use them. I will let their battery run down, permanently, and then I will throw them in my bag or and pull them out on very bright days. And when, inevitably, I forget them on a train or drop them in a lake, then it will be absolutely fine. The suffering will be over — theirs and mine.
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