[drdaeman]

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?

Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories?

Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machine can supplement that in the same way my glasses supplement my vision, or my friend's hearing aid supplements his hearing - that'd be nice. That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right?

But, as I said, there is an important condition. Today, what's in my head stays in there, and is only directly available to me. The machine-assisted memory aid must provide the same guarantees. If any information leaves the device without my direct instruction - that's a hard "no". If someone with physical access to the device can extract the information without a lot of effort - that's also a hard "no". If someone can too easily impersonate myself to the device and improperly gain access - that's another "no". Maybe there are a few more criteria, but I hope you got the overall idea.

If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy - no more than I can do myself. And then - yeah - I want it, wish there'd be something like that.

[encom]

>That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right?

No, we have technology to show you more and more ads, sell you more and more useless crap, and push your opinions on Important Matters toward the state approved ones.

Of course indoor plumbing, farming, metallurgy and printing were great hits, but technology has had a bit of a dry spell lately.

If "An always-on AI that listens to your household" doesn't make you recoil in horror, you need to pause and rethink your life.

[drdaeman]

> you need to pause and rethink your life.

If you can't think of an always-on AI that listens but doesn't cause any horrors (even though its improbable to get to the market in the world we live on), I urge you to exercise your imagination. Surely, it's possible to think of an optimistic scenario?

Even more so, if you think technology is here to unconditionally screw us up no matter what. Honestly - when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy.

[lukan]

I really hope, that before I will get old and fragile, I will get my smart robotic house, with an (local!) AI assistant always listening to my wishes and then executing them.

I rather have the horror of being old and forgotten in a half care like most old people are right now. AI and robots can bring emporerment. And it is up to us, whether we let ad companies serve them to us from the cloud, or local models running in the basement.

[schrodinger]

I don't think that ads _have_ to be evil.

When I look at Google, I see a company that is fully funded by ads, but provides me a number of highly useful services that haven't really degraded over 20 years. Yes, the number of search results that are ads grew over the years, but by and large, Google search and Gmail are tools that serve rather benevolently. And if you're about to disagree with this ask yourself if you're using Gmail, and why?

Then I look at Meta or X, and I see a cesspool of content that's driven families apart and created massive societal divides.

It makes me think that Ads aren't the root of the problem, though maybe a "necessary but not sufficient" component.

[dbtc]

This will not augment memory the way glasses do for sight, this will replace memory the way a wheelchair replaces legs.

[estimator7292]

So do you think disabled people deserve to participate in society or not?

[shevy-java]

Memories are usually private. People can make them public via a blog.

AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.

> If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy

A product can most assuredly violate privacy. Just look how Facebook gathered offline data to interconnect people to reallife data points, without their consent - and without them knowing. That's why I call it Spybook.

Ever since the USA became hostile to Canadians and Europeans this has also become much easier to deal with anyway - no more data is to be given to US companies.

[drdaeman]

> AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.

"AI" on its own is an almost meaningless word, because all it tells is that there's something involving machine learning. This alone doesn't have any implied privacy properties, the devil is always in the untold details.

But, yeah, sure, given the current trends I don't think this device will be privacy-respecting, not to say truly private.

> A product can most assuredly violate privacy.

That depends on the design and implementation.

[beepbooptheory]

Humbly offer this, a cautionary tale perhaps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious

https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction%20-%20Borges%2...

[drdaeman]

I’m not sure I understand the morale of the story. Would you share yours?

A crudest summary of my understanding is that it’s a tale of some dude with eidetic memory who - as a consequence of it - develops a conlang with a huge vocabulary but without abstract concepts.

It’s a stretch for sure, but all I could think of it, is that it’s possibly a tale of how a person with an eidetic memory may find the sheer volume of available information so overwhelming it may even hurt their information processing, like the formation of associative memories. Or something like that, I don’t think I know how it works.

If that, my idea of how machine-assisted memory is supposed to work is opposite of that, it should provide limited but relevant information, with a lot of classifications and references further. Like an encyclopedia with extra fancy natural language querying mechanism. It’s whole point to give awareness about anything user wants to know, faster and more comprehensively than regular diaries, but focused on just what matters for an inquiry.

Fumes, in my understanding, wouldn’t have an idea of a “key” but only “that front door key on a silver keychain” or “smaller mailbox key with a deep scratch on the right side”. If I’d be querying external memory through a natural language interface, it’d be doing opposite of that, heavily relying on abstract ideas as classifiers. Machine that cannot connect “mail”, “key” and “location” into a meaningful query would be useless. Computer “AI” assistant is not an eidetic memory (at least until we start to consider BMI), it’s only a personal encyclopedia at one’s fingertips.