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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
