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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

John’s blogs always set me off in one direction or another. Now he has me thinking:

Our human minds can only hold a finite amount of information in long term and short term memories. I don’t too much buy into direct brain augmentation in the sense of NeuralLink or my friends in the SingularityNET community.

What I am hoping for is external augmentation using smart glasses that record everything I study and that I hear, and sufficient AI (doesn’t have to be AGI) on the backend to learn when to prompt or remind. Ideally this would be paired with something like an iPad that the system could draw on top of what I am looking at.

This is the startup I would like to work for. Apple is supposed to be releasing smart glasses sometime. I hope the hardware and software support is hackable and extensible.

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I expect smart glasses to be the next UI paradigm. Very conveniently portable. AR style visual interfaces. Built in speakers for personal audio (bose already do this in sunglasses). The AR interface could be directly manipulated by hand gestures using cameras and other sensors. I know there have been a couple of false starts (Google Glass) and current products with bigger form factors (Hololens), but I expect spectacles size devices with good UI in the not too distant future, and I look forward to the development opportunities.

The problem that I see is getting systems where I own all of my data - my data never leaves my devices, or is encrypted on my servers.

I used to be a proponent of IoT until realizing that IoT is just a HUGE opportunity to gather the most economic and personal data on people stupid enough to pay for the devices that surveil them. Sort of like paying someone to kick you.

That AI would need to learn what you find important though, and go beyond a "this user has an interest in subject x". So you need to bookmark / store and curate your own content first to get enough material. And even then, your interests will shift over time; this year for example I have an interest in the Go language, but for all I know next year I'm interested in Java again and need a refresher on stuff I've learned ten years ago + what I missed (because I can't keep up to date with language X if I'm working in language Y).

That’s really more of a “flying cars” startup than a “140 characters” one. You should pitch the idea :P

Someone just emailed me with the idea of making it open source. That would work if/when there is commodity and hackable hardware to support it.

There are some movements in this area with the inevitable and inexorable march of progress that drops the prices of high-speed low-rez cameras using mostly off-the-shelf components. If video can be lossy while key features from the feed are processed in-stream, one can get creative with high frame rates (>2000 fps, 256x256 monochrome).[1]

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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