There has been a lot of buzzing about augmented reality. In the spring of this year, MIT student, Pranav Mistry, gave a demo of his new gadget, the Sixth Sense. The idea of his invention is to augment our everyday activities with overlays of information culled from the Internet.

Let’s repeat that.

The idea of his invention is to augment our everyday activities with overlays of information culled from the Internet.

The audience was captivated by this idea. It is obvious they were not at all concerned with the myriad and far-reaching implications.

Now consider this. You are walking down the street, and a stranger walks up to you. The stranger is wearing Mistry’s Sixth Sense. The visual overlays tell him who you are. Yes, your real name, how old you are, where you were born, and anything else that is floating around the Internet. There is one minor problem. The device is wrong. There are, after all, at least five people with the same name in your local area. Take that nation wide, and you’ve multiplied to over one hundred or more.

There are other implications as well.

If you are no longer required to recall information, and you rely upon these overlays to make your decisions for you, your brain cells will begin to die off, thereby increasing the risks for early onset dementia, such as Alzheimer’s. Not only that, trending companies or big brother (take your pick) will now have plugged in to your every move. And importantly, over time, mind will eventually be discarded and replaced, perhaps, by something closer to a reptilian brain. Where mind has not been uploaded to computer, rather computer controls mind.

The Utopian dream has just become a nightmare. Are you willing to give yourself up, for this sixth sense?