What’s Going On in That Head of Yours?

The advert had already finished when I started laughing.

Adam gave me that look.

Not “What did you see?”
Not “What did you hear?”

But:

“What’s going on in that head of yours?”

We’ve been together so long that he no longer looks for an outside explanation.

“Those glasses,” I said.

“What glasses?”

“The ones in the advert. With AI. If you get a text while you’re wearing them, where does it go?”

He looked at me.

“What do you mean, where does it go?”

“Well, does something read it out, or does it appear on the inside of the lens?”

I genuinely had no idea. I’d seen an advert, absorbed roughly two words and gone back to what I was doing.

My brain, however, had taken the matter further.

Now I could picture an entire pedestrian street.

Everyone appears to be looking straight ahead. At last, people have looked up from their phones. And yet two people walk straight into each other. One is in a meeting with their boss. The other is trying to understand why their child needs 800 kronor before three o’clock.

Someone is standing motionless in the middle of a pedestrian crossing, reading “We need to talk.”

That’s hardly a message you can just stroll through.

“And imagine if I sent you a text,” I said.

Adam went quiet for a moment.

He knows how I write.

I often start with something perfectly reasonable. A question, for example.

But to answer the question, the recipient needs to understand the background. And for that, it helps to know what happened beforehand. Also, that I’ve already considered the solution they’re otherwise going to suggest.

I’m really just trying to save time.

So I write everything out from the beginning.

Then I reread what I’ve sent and discover that I’ve left out the most important part.

So I send another one.

“You wouldn’t be able to see a thing,” I said.

By now, I’d started laughing again.

I could picture him standing outside Åhléns, his entire field of vision taken up by my thoughts on when we should leave and why we might need to take two cars, depending on something my mother hadn’t answered yet.

He’d try to peer between the paragraphs.

Perhaps tilt his head a little to see around a parenthesis.

And just as a gap opened up and he caught a glimpse of the pavement, I’d write:

“Oh, and one more thing.”

“You’d have to stop somewhere whenever I got in touch.”

“I already do sometimes,” he said.

I chose not to pursue that.

There were bigger questions.

How would this work in traffic?

Would the police have to pull over everyone wearing glasses now? And how would you explain that you were, in fact, looking straight ahead, but the road was temporarily behind a message about dinner?

In my head, Adam had already been pulled over.

“Do you know why we stopped you?”

“No.”

“You were driving very slowly.”

“My wife sent me a text.”

“Are you reading messages while you drive?”

“No, I’m trying to see the road.”

“And how’s that going?”

“Not great. My wife’s opened with ‘Just a quick question.’”

By this point, I was laughing so much that I had to repeat parts of the explanation.

Adam sat there and waited. He’s used to hearing a story from someone who’s already seen the whole film in her head.

“But maybe it reads them out,” he said at last.

I paused.

He had a point.

Perhaps nobody would have to stop in the middle of a pedestrian street and try to read a text by looking at their own nose.

All because someone wanted to know whether we had any cream at home.

Perhaps you just heard it in your ear instead.

“Oh. Well, then you’ll have to listen.”

“To all of it?”

I thought he could have sounded a little less worried.

“Yes. Otherwise you’ll miss the context.”

He thought for a moment.

“Can you speed it up?”

I was beginning to feel that his interest in this technology had taken a rather disappointing turn.

I’d identified several potential problems for society and was trying to have a serious discussion about them.

He wanted to fast-forward his wife.

Later, I thought of something else about the glasses.

Adam had gone out for a bit, so I picked up my phone and texted him.

“Just a quick thought.”

Then I realised I’d need to explain the background first.