Lovely Irish Times piece by Shane Hegarty about the implications of Google’s new toy.

Imagine the near future. Sometime next year. You, sir, are standing in a public toilet and a man sidles up to the urinal beside you. He nods at you out of politeness. You notice he’s wearing glasses. Then the guy takes out his phone and snaps a picture of you going about your business.

Something approximating a fuss would, no doubt, ensue.

At some point next year, maybe in a public toilet but probably on the street or on your morning commute, you’ll see your first pair of Google Glass glasses, the internet for the eyes that are currently with developers but have been given an increasing airing in recent weeks.

You’ll look at them. Everyone will look at them. The wearer will be looking at you. And you’ll stick it in the memory bank, tell the office about it and try and describe it.

But the Google Glass owner? He’ll have been able to record the whole encounter, play it back, download it, upload it, save it.

The funny thing is that even the Google bosses are beginning to wake up to this. Here, for example, is the company’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, talking about it at Harvard:

Talking out loud to control the Google Glasses via voice recognition is “the weirdest thing,” Schmidt said in a talk on Thursday at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

People will have to develop new etiquette to deal with such products that can record video surreptitiously and bring up information that only the wearer can see, Schmidt said.

“There are obviously places where Google Glasses are inappropriate,” he said.

Google is making the glasses available to software developers this year but has said they won’t be available more broadly until 2014.

Google has decided that it will pre-approve all apps offered to glasses users, unlike its more wide open market for Android phones and tablets.

“It’s so new, we decided to be more cautious,” Schmidt said. “It’s always easier to open it up more in the future.”

LATER: Turns out that Google’s plans to have Apple-type control over Glass operating system might be a bit optimistic. It seems that someone has jailbroken the device already.

Just days after its release to developers, Google’s Glass headset has already been hacked to give users full control of its Android operating system, according to Jay Freeman, a well-known Android and iOS developer who tested a known exploit for Android on Glass yesterday and announced his success on Twitter Friday afternoon. The “root” or “jailbreak” technique Freeman found would potentially remove any restrictions Google might place on Glass, though it’s not yet clear exactly what those restrictions might be in consumer versions of the device.

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As readers of my Observer column know, I regard the Google self-driving car project as very significant for a number of reasons. One is that it signals a need to re-examine our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do. (I had hitherto assumed that driving was a task that only a human could do with reasonable safely.) The other is that the technology could have a devastating (and as yet undiscussed) impact on employment. (Millions of people earn their living from driving; and in many cultures it’s a route to first employment for immigrants — c.f. New York taxi-drivers.) This Business Insider piece is useful not because it undermines that logic, but because it puts the astonishing success of the technology into perspective by highlighting the circumstances in which self-driving cars can run into difficulties.

The first challenge is driving in snow.

When snow is on the road, the cars often have a tough time “seeing” the lane markers and other cues that they use to stay correctly positioned on the road. It will be interesting to see how the Google team sorts that one out. [Yes, but human drivers have the same problems, as I know from my own experience driving on East Anglian roads in a blizzard.]

A second challenge, apparently, is when the car encounters a change in a road that is not yet reflected in its onboard “map.” In those situations, the car can presumably get lost, just the way a human can. [In this case a human copes better — I know because I have an outdated SatNav map which sometimes has me driving through open fields on new motorway sections.]

A third challenge is driving through construction zones, accident zones, or other situations in which a human is directing traffic with hand signals. The cars are excellent at observing stop signs, traffic lights, speed limits, the behavior of other cars, and other common cues that human drivers use to figure out how fast to go and where and when to turn. But when a human is directing traffic with hand signals–and especially when these hand signals conflict with a traffic light or stop sign–the cars get confused.

(Imagine pulling up to an intersection in which a police officer is temporarily directing traffic and overriding a traffic light. What should the car pay attention to? How should the car be “taught” to give the police officer’s hand signals more weight than the traffic light? How should the car interpret the hand signals, which are often different from person to person? And what if the cop is just pointing at you and yelling, which happens frequently in intersections in New York?)

According to an engineer (not a Googler) who was involved in the conversation I had about this latter challenge, none of these problems are insurmountable. But they’re certainly interesting. One of the other interesting points made in the article is that insurance premiums might one day be higher for human-driven vehicles, because they will be, statistically, less ‘safe’.