It would be cool to:
1) Make a Meta Smart Glasses take a photo every 2 seconds.
2) Send images to some server in the cloud.
3) Run OCR and object detection/labeling on these images.
4) Then present an app that allows searching (and chatting with) your past.
I could then ask the LLM things like:
1) Where did I left my wallet?
2) Did I get my credit card back after paying the restaurant yesterday? (ADHD things, don't ask)
3) What was written in my daughter's new tshirt today?
Bonus point if the app also records and transcribes audio so you could ask the LLM things like:
1) In the last meeting, what was the deadline that we settled on?
2) What was the phone number of that person I met in the park earlier today?
3) What was the name of the investor I met today?
Bonus bonus point if it has access to your phone calls to so it can transcribe and index what others said.
See Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Generally Black Mirror episodes are not intended to be aspirational.
Black Mirror is fiction, a lot of it works well thanks to our suspension of disbelief.
Remove cloud from the equation, replacing it with a properly safeguarded fully owned hardware located on your own premises - basically make it privacy-respecting, minimizing abuse potential, do a proper audit, and it becomes a super desirable system for people with neurological differences (or just stressed folks - attention and memory suffer under the stress too), a glasses that enhance memory rather than vision. Sure, not without caveats and gotchas (don’t bring it to a poker night lol), but not that cyberpunky-bad either.
Have you watched the Black Mirror episode in question (S1E3)? Because the point of it was the tech itself and had nothing to do with sharing or the cloud.
An extremely similar take on this, that predates Black Mirror, was in some sci-fi media whose name, appropriately enough, currently escapes me. Their premise is that there was a species who evolved to develop a flawless memory. It's a subset of the Black Mirror episode (and this dubious idea) because there, at least, memory is a purely private thing.
Yet the end too was quite predictable and logical -- frequently destroying those of this species simply because your own life and mind ends up becoming more tempting and destructive than even the most enticing of drugs. One could simply lose themselves in your own memories. What need is there for the rest of your life when you can simply endlessly relive, in perfect clarity, the best moments of your life - ones that you, in many cases, will likely never surpass?
I am curious; ChatGPT suggests
- the science fiction novella "The Rememberers" by A.E. van Vogt, originally published as "The Book of Ptath" in 1943.
- the species known as "Trills" from the "Star Trek" universe, particularly in the series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."
Edit: the first suggestion seems to be a hallucination
Even without perfect memory, this can still happen, especially if something like PTSD is involved. I myself have a dissociative disorder and sometimes it can be difficult not to just relive the past over and over. (It's not like this is a daily struggle, but during low points it comes up.)
IMO that is a more fundamental argument about removing information from the anxious and jealous who cannot handle the truth. Similar to medical paternalism where the doctor has to decide which test results to tell patients about. Which I understand, but can also be used to go full ham into china style totalitarian censorship regime for the 'peoples own good'.
Also you might not realize how much the hard of hearing, deaf, and other neurodiverse ADHD types would find a memory prosthetic like that very useful unless you are in their very own shoes, for possibly years.
I have a coworker who was tracking Black Mirror premises that were being taken as inspiration by people on the internet. This may be one of those. A lot of SF authors have expressed this idea: "I meant it as a warning, not a road map". I think I read either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson expressing this about their respective dystopias and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were trying to implement them.
Anyway, posting this comment so I remember to send it to her tomorrow.
“Don’t create the torment nexus”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
I'd rather not make conclusions of a technology impact based on a 44 minutes episode that was optimizing for maximum entertainment.
So there's nothing fundamentally wrong in taking inspiration from sci-fi.
Sure the presented perspective is negative but that is because the producer explored local maximums to the benefit of the audience. They are obliged to paint technology in a certain way to captivate viewers.
Does that mean that the presented reality is the only possible one? Certainly not, that would be reductive.
Many popular technologies today are used to scam a defraud people. Does that mean said technologies are fundamentally bad? Not at all.
I use technology as a force multiplier.
Reminded me of the "Torment Nexus" tweet:
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
I thought about mentioning the Torment Nexus but I figured it is already in the back of everybody’s heads, in this type of conversation, haha.
I don't see it as "Black Mirror" but rather as a feature. I pretty much record everything about myself anyway (locally, selfhosted) - so this alone wouldn't add any other obstacles than storage.
a local model that can analyze the videostream/files and answer questions would be great.
And yet we are already rushing towards this.
for a less misanthropic take on the same idea, I recommend Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
really? i tend to look to them for ideas
Lol!
A restaurant should never be taking your credit card out of your view, ever. Really, they should not even be handling it: you should be swiping it yourself at the terminal at the cash register when you pay before leaving.
I would say 95% of the restaurants I go to take your card and run it themselves.
That’s insane. Here in Canada the waiter/waitress brings a portable pos terminal to the table and you pay through that. I’d be incredibly uncomfortable if they ran away with my credit card.
Why is that insane? I think a more appropriate description would be "perfectly normal".
Because normally you aren’t supposed to just let strangers wander off with your credit cards.
I offer up 40 years of my life as a counter example. Maybe it's a bit city thing, idk, but this is not the norm where I'm from. You get the bill, put your card in it, they take it and run it, bring it back, and you sign the receipt.
We had that locally. They're abandoning it, citywide. Nobody liked it, it was cumbersome and invasive, it involved your credit card anyway but was a worse experience for everybody.
How is that a worse experience? I don’t have to mess around the bill to add a tip, I just punch it into the machine and then tap my card or phone. It also makes it super easy to split a bill if you are in a group.
You don’t mind the waiter/waitress standing over you while you decide how much to tip them?
Yes, but in the US, the waiter taking the card out of your view, doing something with it, then bringing it back is the norm.
I'd never seen a restaurant do that in the UK.
I think it's a relic of the times before handheld payment terminals existed.
Also, having to decide on a tip percentage directly in front of the waiter is awkward sometimes, doing it the US way avoids that. Tipping is very common in the US.
That is exactly what the (highly criticised) Humane AI Pin does
It really doesn’t. It has no history or proactive understanding, it only runs a query when you ask it
Frame from Brilliant Labs is getting close to providing hardware that can realistically provide the data in a user friendly and fairly incognito style.
I’ve preordered them.