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Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

Why are people up in arms about this? Imagine a transhuman future where we all have superhuman memory and have integrated mind machine interfaces, able to perfectly transfer information between ourselves. Would you insist that people's memories be degraded to be close to the average memory quality? Or would you prevent them from transferring the information via things like degrading their perfect drawing skills? (Or maybe just make drawing people's faces from memory without their consent illegal? Presumably while also making it illegal to do things like sharing a high fidelity memory with a friend or spouse)

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I live in an all-party consent state, and would like to keep it that way. I don't want to be traced through other people's recordings, particularly through something that is easy to always have on.

I just reported to my friends that bobthepanda posted a message on hacker news. I didn't ask for your consent to tell them. I also told my sister about a conversation I had with a friend. I didn't ask the friend's permission to share.

but that doesn't scale, and isn't super high fidelity anyways (eyewitness recall is notoriously bad).

Just because something is possible, doesn't mean we should make more extreme versions of it possible.

It does scale. People have been writing what other people do in books and newspapers for centuries and spreading the info to millions of people

I see it as what right do you have to prevent me from sharing my experiences and memories and what right do you have do prevent me from augmenting that memory?

Taken to an extreme your POV seems like it would ban paper. Why I am allowed to take notes about what someone is saying other than in my brain? We should ban paper! Oh, I replaced paper with a computer. Oh, I used a computer to do speech recognition and record the notes. Oh, I videod the speech. What if I augment my brain. People have long been working on making chips to help people with brain damage. What if they get to the point those chips have flawless memory?

I get those are hypotheticals, but they help to think about what's the underlying principles. Today I can walk down the street and live stream everything I see so it's not like we aren't there already at some degree.

I also saw some people brought up they're in a "consent" state. I don't know of any consent states that prevent videotaping without consent. If they did, all security cameras would be illegal. I do know at least one state prevents audio recording without consent. I suspect that won't last. For one because everyone will have a video camera + mic so at some point the state will catch up to how people behave rather than try to stop them. For 2 because given enough processing and framerate I suspect you can extract audio from video (). For 3 you could use lip readers (or trained AI) to extract conversation from video.

() https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...

So what is your solution to the dilemma I pose? Forced memory degradation or prevention of memory transfer?

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I think it's is a good question, and I don't have a solution to the dilemma.

However I think it's predictable that if I lived in a place with a significant number of those super-augmented people, and I wasn't one of them, the quality of my life would be extremely dependent on their attitude towards me. There would be extreme power asymmetry. I could only hope they were kind, as I'd have next to no power in that world.

If I was one of them as well, then I think it's difficult to extrapolate from current human experience what society would be like. It could go in a lot of different ways. Some SF literature explores these questions.

The current human world, with the addition of some people having high-tech, always-on sensors and computers analysing everything around them is a bit like the first scenario above: Some super-augmented, others not. As the tech becomes progressively more advanced, those who don't have the tech can only hope those who own and control the tech are kind, (that's not generally the camera wearers, by the way), because it creates a substantial power asymmetry, which keeps increasing as the technology advances and is distributed unevenly.

That future is still far off. It's not a stretch to imagine that by then, humanity has made stable colonies on different planets so we can get away from greedy business leaders like Mark and live in enclaves that actually reflect our values to a much larger extent than the current world allows for.

If, for example, I were to live in a colony that postulated that any augmentation that could be used as surveillance must be running on fully open hardware and software, and that there are legal (but not technical) restrictions around selling this data for commercial gain, I'd sign up happily. Make that instead a Facebook enclave, and I'd be catching the first ship off the planet.

Cause it's Facebook... Any other company, sign me up... But fuck you Facebook....

Because this is the exact same cyberpunk delusion that has got us to this point.

All the utopian cyberpunk dreams were/are wrong. There is just no evidence anything plays out like this. All evidence points towards a dystopian outcome.

Hopefully, personal IR laser countermeasures.

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