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.
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 in a tech utopia something like this existing would make it not a utopia to me, since I don’t see a similarity between regular voluntary posted texts and social media submissions and a persistent recording device.
Like the social situation automatically means people who come in contact with them are being recorded against their will. When it comes to IMs in your example people can choose to participate or not, but this tech is not the case.
Unless there is some Black Mirror type built in privacy block of people showing up as glitched out avatars if they haven’t opted in.
It looks like you’ve thought of an idea to solve the problem that you stated.
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.