Facebook's artificial intelligence chief says we won't see the company's new technology used until people are ready to accept our new back-of-your-head recognition reality—should we believe him?

"It's a scientific experiment to see how well we can do in this respect," Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, said at a French technology conference in New York City Wednesday. "This is not some dark basement somewhere where we are hiding what we're working on, we publish everything we do with the broader research community—we are trying to push science forward."

LeCun said that a series of advances have made it possible to snag a person's face in one photo, and then to recognize them later. "We can identify them by which clothes they're wearing and the body type they have, even if we don't see their faces," he said.