In the darker corners of the tech industry, an untold number of professionals have come to believe in a controversial theory known as Roko’s basilisk, which holds that a future AI super intelligence would torture any human who didn’t help it come into existence.
Now, in a twist that should please any writer, the guy who’s spearheading Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses is named Rocco Basilico — which has delighted and freaked out some online observers.
“I grabbed my head in horror hearing that a man named ROCCO BASILICO is designing ANYTHING to do with artificial intelligence,” one person posted on X. “That’s genuinely the worst possible name he could have.”
“Nominative determinism at its worst,” one Redditor quipped.
Kidding aside, Basilico is the scion of the family that owns EssilorLuxottica, the biggest eyeglass company in the world and parent company of sunglass brand Ray-Ban, and is the firm’s chief wearables officer, according to Forbes.
Basilico came into Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s orbit when he cold emailed Zuck with a pitch about a partnership, which has resulted in the now increasingly popular and AI-enhanced Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses, with plans to manufacture 10 million of these specs next year.
Meta introduced its first smart spectacles with Ray-Ban back in 2021, and has come out with successive iterations since, with the latest one demonstrated in an embarrassingly glitchy showcase earlier this month in which the AI hallucinated and gave wrong instructions during a cooking demo, among other fails.
For any conspiracy theorists wondering why the name of Zuckerberg’s AI glasses guy aligns with a nightmarish internet theory that inspired not just tech billionaire Elon Musk and music star Grimes to hook up but also a murderous cult, sleep easy: the demo clearly showed that the glasses weren’t quite ready for prime time.
Or maybe that’s what a malevolent super intelligence would want us to think. But we’ll be keeping an eye on this guy.
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