Smart Glasses by Chris Oguntolu

Is It a Mistake? See the world. Overlook the surroundings.

Smart Glasses: Is It a Mistake? is the first novel I have written. Timo Ahrens, thirty-one, IT consultant in Zurich, has his life under control. At least he says so. His calendar is full, his charm works, and his relationships last exactly as long as he does not take them seriously. 30. June 2026 at the AI fair in Berlin he buys a pair of smart glasses — sleeker than any smartphone, smarter than any therapist. From the outside they look like design. From the inside they are something else. They read his mood. They suggest his answers. They show him the world a little sharper than it is. At first they are merely practical. Then almost invisible. Then indispensable. Until Timo no longer quite knows which of his most honest sentences he formulated himself — and which were whispered to him first by someone else. An urban, ironic close-up about closeness, control, and the question of what remains of a person when a tool whispers them the words for their most honest sentences. Reality Sci-Fi: not a distant future, but this summer.

This book is an experiment, and the thesis underneath it is meant to provoke: AI is not replacing our work — it is quietly replacing our honesty. After close to two decades working with cloud, platforms and AI, I am close enough to these topics to feel where they are heading before most of the public conversation around them catches up. I wanted a medium more honest than slides or essays, and fiction turned out to be the right place to put it. Smart Glasses is the first volume in a series I am planning; the original story I had in mind was a different one entirely, but the smart glasses kept being the cleanest way to look at AI from many sides at once — practical, ethical, emotional, and at times absurd.

The book uses the glasses as a vehicle to do something I find hard to do in any other format: examine, debate, and quietly fantasise about where this is all going. There is a lot of "what if" between the sentences. Much of what the book shows is, technically, still some distance away. But it is presented as if 2026 had already delivered what the industry keeps promising for "in a few years." The future does not arrive as singularity — it arrives as comfort. First practical, then almost invisible, then indispensable. That compressed timeline is the engine of the story: it lets the reader feel the implications instead of just reading about them.

The question underneath every chapter is the same one I keep coming back to in my own work: how far away is this, really? Not as a forecast, but as a feeling. Smart Glasses is short, urban, and written so a non-technical reader can pick it up on a weekend and come away with the same uncomfortable questions an engineer would. If you think I am wrong on a single line, say so out loud — silence is the worst review a book like this can get. It is the first book in an ongoing platform I am building to look at AI from different angles — narrative, ethical, speculative — and to invite readers, technical or not, into the conversation. You can find Smart Glasses: Is It a Mistake? on Amazon and at smartglassesbook.com.