In wartime, technology is driven by our shared weakness for violence. In 1939, the RAF was still sending biplanes into battle. By 1945 we had jets. Spitfires and stealth bombers are beautiful things because more design man-hours have been devoted to the technology of killing than into any other field of endeavour.
But in peacetime, sex is technology's primary driver. Even when the pornographers don't innovate they're early adopters. The first known fruity movie was made two years after the first moving pictures of any kind. It's been suggested that it was the greater availability of porn on VHS formats that helped it to win the video format wars over Betamax. And there's a reason why Polaroid's innovative camera that eliminated embarrassing trips to the chemist was called the Swinger.
Nowhere is the pornographers' symbiotic relationship with technology more evident than online. Back in the 1990s, when the internet explosion was a mere spark, Penthouse was handing out modems to subscribers. By 2010, out of the 1m most visited websites, around 50,000 carried erotic content. Live internet chat, be it Snapchat or grownup video-conferencing, has its genesis in the porn industry. LiveJasmin.com is the world's most visited porn site and one of the most successful websites of any kind. Of the estimated 1bn regular internet users, around 2.5% visit that one site at least once a month.
Electronic Card Systems, a mid-90s startup that provided payment services for the livelier kind of internet content, pioneered the kind of secure transactions that drive Amazon or PayPal today. It's been estimated that about 13% of all web searches are for porn. And the smut peddlers are leading the charge into the mobile space as well. Farley Cahen, vice president of adult video trade organisation AVN, told PC World magazine that, according to Juniper Research, the worldwide market for mobile porn would be worth $4.6bn (£3bn) in 2012.
Within days of Apple's iPad launch – despite considerable effort having been made to shut out Flash from the tablet – a company claimed to have worked out how to hack a solution. We can't say who it was but, trust us, they weren't selling cookery videos.
So it's no huge surprise that Google's announcement that they wouldn't allow any pornographic content on their new Google Glass platform ("We don't allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material") has already been challenged. Muck-peddlers MiKandi have come up with a Google Glass offering. It's a "Hot or Not" type photo app that allows users to submit photos that are then voted up or down by other app users.
Google don't like it, and they're taking steps to make sure it doesn't reach the market. But as we've seen, pornographers are a resourceful bunch. Whether it requires "jailbreaking" technology or just old-fashioned sneakiness, Google Glass wearers will inevitably be able to have images of people who have neglected to put their pyjamas on beamed into their eyeballs.
Sex and technology are twirled around each other like twists of fruity DNA. Dirty Glass is coming our way whether we like it or not. The only question is – is it better to let this stuff happen in the open, where at least some measure of control can be exercised, or drive it onto the unregulated dark web where it's going to rub up against distinctly more sinister content?'