> The eyes are the mirror of the soul and reflect everything that seems to be hidden; and like a mirror, they also reflect the person looking into them. —Paulo Coelho If screen-based social media made our minds the product, what comes next will require our souls. Our phones revealed our behavior in the digital world, which they used to train robots that now live in our screens. Soon, our glasses will reveal who we are in the physical world, and our souls will train the bots that will fill our streets. For the promise of connectivity, we surrendered our attention and they used our likeness to We surrendered our attention for the promise of a more connected world. They then robbed us of our likeness to create our replacements. What we got was an army of robots built in our likeness, ready to replace us. They trained the robots in our phones A triangle looking in, and looking out. They moved out of our phones and into the world. We gave them our They want our eyes they want our souls. They took our interests, likes, dislikes, They cloned us. They're cloning us. The internet wants to experience itself. One day, we'll see a robot using an iPhone and that's when we know we've come full circle. AR no longer has to rely on our inputs to learn what we feel. It can look into our eyes. They are fragile and scared. Like an insecure they smother us. A line blurred between us and them. They want to use AR glasses to collect the data from our off-screen lives, to use that data Because who we are at dinner with friends, or in a park with our families, that's who we truly are. Those are the moments we expose our souls. So, they're coming for everything. They want the butterflies in our stomach. The sweat on our brows. They want to be the first to know when we're happy or sad. They want to note the nights we walk in the rain. The days when we can barely speak from grief. They want to be there when we get engaged. We can no longer judge technology at face value, we must consider the technologist; who is the man behind the curtain and what will he claim was the inevitability in fifty years. They're coming for the last scraps of our attention they do not already control. They want to listen to us laugh at a friends joke at brunch. They want to watch when we open doors for others. They want to know when nodding your head to a stranger on the sidewalk is appropriate, and aggregate the most efficient way to cross a busy street. For a decade and a half they've been trying to stap a camera and microphone to our faces. A barometer to measure our movements. They've burned tens of billions of dollars in R&D, hired the biggest celebrities and pumped thousands of press releases onto the laps of our journalists. Augmented reality, they'll tell you, is the logical evolution of the personal computer. They'll tell us that augmented reality is a way to interact with our computers more naturally. they'll say, with a straight face, that screen time is a problem solvable only by moving our screens two inches from our faces. They'll say that AR is freedom from technology but really, they just want us better able to walk with our chains. It is impossible to overstate our pessimism for the future of cyberspace. Our imaginations are simply not equipped to predict the lengths in which technocrats will go to take every last second of our lives.