TLDR: Techbros in SF are wearing AI pins that record everything everyone says around them.
“My general sense is that we should assume we are being recorded at all times,” said Clara Brenner, a partner at venture capital firm Urban Innovation Fund. “Of course, this is a horrible way to live your life.”
Damn right it is. Every day one step closer to dystopia. Fuck this shit.
Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Tought these fuckers nothing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes–Oxley_Act
Corporations and c-staff lie cheat and steal, They come up with a legal ideas and tell people to act on them. The last thing they need is something storing information about what they’re actually saying and is set around them. These spy pins and the VR boardroom note takers are just generating documentation to get these assholes hold off to prison, when we start caring about that start again
You don’t keep those emails, you don’t keep those records, you don’t keep audio or video past a predetermined period of time someone discovery comes for you , You’re not caught shredding evidence.
Sweet, AI will think everyone on earth is from California
In a techno utopia, it would be nice to use something like this to have perfect memory. Assuming it was private, self-hosted and open source.
In reality, these are likely vendor locked hardware attached to cloud services awaiting their first massive security breach. A privacy nightmare that will just become more e-waste
Would it?
A chatlog of what everyone has ever said to you? Every misspeak, miscommunication, he-said-she-said, emotional comment? What problem would it solve?
It might solve some problems, and introduce a shit ton of new ones. As technology always does.
Given that a lot of people communicate via social media, that record already exists but we don’t have access to it most of it.
I communicate with a lot of my friends via IMs and so there’s a perfect history of our conversations in the chat logs. It is useful to be able to search to find a previous conversation. I’m not a masochist so I don’t go back and dwell on arguments or things said in anger.
There are people with medical conditions that would benefit from having an augmented memory. People with early Alzheimer’s, or Traumatic Brain Injury could recall previous conversations confidently.
People with high functioning autism could use the record to handle social confusion. Often they’ll have difficulty in social situations without understanding what went wrong, so their memory of the encounter will be incomplete/unreliable. Having an objective record could let a trusted third party help them learn/understand what happened.
I could imagine people wouldn’t mind leaving their memories to their children after they die. Or victims/witnesses of crime using their augmented memory to accurately identify the perpetrator.
Sure, I can easily think of downsides as well. But, it does seem likely that these kinds of devices that are always recording will become more common as prices for storage and hardware keep dropping.
People with high functioning autism could use the record to handle social confusion. Often they’ll have difficulty in social situations without understanding what went wrong, so their memory of the encounter will be incomplete/unreliable. Having an objective record could let a trusted third party help them learn/understand what happened.
As one of those people, I have to be clear: this is not how things would shake out. The vast majority of the time, the misunderstanding comes from tone, not from the words used. Providing a transcript showing that one’s words are inoffensive has done little to improve the situations where I’ve been able to provide them - NTs often double-down that their emotional interpretation of your tone still matters more than the specific words you chose.
Seems we are talking about different things here. By “perfect” I assumed you meant “complete”, as opposed to an IM-log, e-mail, letters or other async communications.
For people with medical conditions such as dementia, of course, this could solve real problems. I’m not saying we should pull the brakes in every case. My only point is that more data doesn’t equal “better” in every case.
Forgetting things are an underappreciated part of being human. Of course accumulating knowledge with science etc is what drives humanity forward. But when living our day to day lives, forgetting stuff is not just a bug, it’s a feature. It enables us to move on, letting go, and revisit memories more organically and qualitatively. For example the rush of nostalgia that hits you when you randomly hear a song from your childhood. Compare this to prompting your local AI with “give me a perfect list of songs from my childhood”.
For example it’s interesting to listen to accounts from savants with near perfect memories who talk about the struggles of remembering everything.
I’m not saying use technology to extend a person’s biological memory. I’m saying use technology to keep a record of a person’s life (obviously I know the privacy implications of doing this in actual practice in the year 2025, which is why I prefaced my comment with “In a techno utopia”).
You, personally, will still forget things and be capable of nostalgia.
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that people like to have pictures. They collect pictures of vacations that they enjoyed, pictures of their children when they were X age, pictures of dead relatives and pictures of themselves with friends. Because people enjoy revisiting memories. When video cameras became more ubiquitous, people took videos of vacations they enjoyed, videos of their children’s first steps, videos of themselves. There are entire markets for services which let you store and retrieve every picture that you’ve ever taken.
At the same time everyone has a story where they wish they had recorded some event. For example, a baby’s first steps that a spouse missed because they were at work or some unexpected spectacular event. Or even mundane things like ‘Where did I leave my phone?’. Having the ability to keep a record of memories, in video or in some hypothetical full-sensory recording, of every moment is something that people would be interested in.
Compare this to prompting your local AI with “give me a perfect list of songs from my childhood”.
Perhaps this is just a matter of taste, because I would absolutely do this.
Nobody seems to care that it will be used as blackmail and control. Even when you’re on your best behavior with the best intentions. Something will happen that you want to remain private.
Even if it’s private and independent, I would feel uneasy with that. I might want to store and analyze the recordings of my life - but would people that I caught on camera want the same?..
I think of it like a memory. I can remember seeing people, they don’t have to consent to my having a memory of them.
I think it is the same if the memory is stored on electronic storage. Though, I would not trust something so private to a cloud service. It would have to be a secure storage that only I physically control and have the ability to decrypt.
Black Mirror did an episode about this, if you haven’t seen it. It’s called “The Entire History of You”. Obviously, since it is Black Mirror, they present a dystopian take.
I think it’s way too precise and permanent to compare to human memory.
Humans have been extending and improving on our biological capabilities using technology since before recorded history. Improving our memory seems like it will eventually happen also.
I do completely understand why this would be a nightmare in practice. Governments would claim that they had the right to search it and it could still be stolen or accessed by unauthorized bad people.
I don’t want to to be a part of people’s recording in real life encounters against my consent. That black mirror episode of everything you see being recorded was a nightmare.
True. But it’s still up to us whether to use those “memory enhancements” on other, non-consenting people.
Glad these things would be technically illegal in my state due to two-party-consent laws for recording.
This is still a bit of a nightmare. This being illegal will prevent people from showing the recordings publicly, but if they record for private use, no one would prevent them, or even know…
The article addresses that since California is two-party as well. The laws won’t stop it.
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Two party consent laws in California come down to a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and that has been worked out in the legal system over time to be pretty much any place with an open door or window, even a conference room inside a private business is fair game if the door is open to the hallway.
I mean this has already been happening for years with stuff like Google home and Alexa.
