As a short-sighted person, the topic of augmented reality (AR) glasses always makes me think of a scene from classic comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. In it, our follicly challenged hero Larry David and a police officer are standing before graffiti spelling out the phrase bald asshole, as directed at David. Shrugging, the shaven-headed cop says he personally isn’t offended by the slur, to which our hero reminds the officer he’s not bald, but has chosen to shave his hair to look fashionable.

“We don't really consider you part of the bald community, with all due respect,” as David puts it, bluntly.

I think the same way about so-called 'glassholes', those early adopters of AR specs who filmed people without consent and generally embarrassed those of us in the spectacles-wearing community over a decade ago. Apparently, they’re on the way back, what with Meta’s new AI glasses hitting the streets. While I’d heard whispers of the glassholes' return, the message was strangely loud and clear while attending Connected Britain, a major U.K. telecom and connectivity event held in London at the end of September.

While on the ground, I was surprised how many execs referenced the AI glasshole use case as the most pressing one to face the bandwidth of tomorrow. Mentions of visuals generated by AI at a user’s whim, filling up their field of vision, were discussed with a straight face simply because Meta drummed up a publicity buzz a week or two beforehand.

I had fears this would happen when T-Mobile announced SuperMobile in August, promising 5G-Advanced and network slicing capabilities for niche markets such as extended reality (XR) and autonomous vehicles. It all seemed very out there, especially considering more realistic use cases such as large file transfers, video conferencing, and industrial/internet of things functions.

Interestingly, network slices were rarely mentioned at Connected Britain. There was a similar lack of discourse around the real impact of AI on tomorrow's networks, such as the increasing demand of AI inference, and the possible bandwidth suck of countless AI agents.

Instead, AI came up in described in vague, bombastic terms, stretching out the AI hype cycle ever more to its limits. One sales director I spoke with from BSS vendor Lifecycle Software, Anthony Floyd, saw mention of AI as a "ticket to play" in today’s network sales, while noting that in telecoms, the AI reality is “nothing radical, and nothing more than just a little bit of streamlined optimization in the back end.”

But the possibilities of AI for digital telecom transformation remain the same, as well as those network stresses I mentioned earlier. There are also other pressing issues. Take cybersecurity, with AI-driven threats posing an existential issue to telecom companies both in Britain and beyond. If you’re not convinced, then take a look at U.K. telecom giant Colt, which has been offline due to a ransomware attack since August, and is expected to stay so into December.

So why is everyone talking about the metaverse again? When OpenAI first dropped ChatGPT, I’m sure a lot of tech journalists were glad something with real potential had arrived to push back all the talk of AR, XR, and the metaverse from post-COVID tech keynotes and product pushes. Those were embarrassing times, and hearing about glassholes brought it all back to this cynical writer.

If anything, AR glasses will become the equivalent of today’s low take-up of cloud gaming, or, in analogue terms, the niche set up of a 5.1 audio system. In other words, a nice-to-have won't be convenient to use or easy to leverage for a long time coming.

It's time to curb your enthusiasm. Please stop talking about the metaverse, and check your vision to see the real state of play at work today.