Hacker News Reader

Comment by frontman1988 | Hacker News Reader

frontman1988

The future will definitely have devices which record visually/verbally all your life. VR headsets are already able to record all your facial expressions. A google glasses like gear which records all your life is pretty much possible in the near future. The future influencers won't have to carry a phone/camera to create vlogs, they would just see wherever they want and the glasses will record not only the thing they are seeing but also their expressions. Privacy will probably not be such a big thing as now given most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online.

View on HN

Ted Chiang explores this idea in a short story called "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" (https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-of-...), which takes place in a world where commercial, individual, always-on recording exists. Ted Chiang also wrote the short story that the movie Arrival was based on.

Halperin's debut novel _The Truth Machine_ also has people living "documented lives", with always-on video and audio recording, as a primary plot element.

As does the Neanderthal parallax by Robert J. Sawyer [0]. It describes an advanced civilization of Neanderthals who have taken completely different societal choices. IIRC, each neanderthal has a recording device that constantly films and uploads a 3D feed of their surroundings. In case of murder, the court can access this recording to determine find the killer.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids

> Privacy will probably not be such a big thing as now given most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online

That's not quite right. People are just unaware of the power of what they share and usually react quite negatively if their data is used against them and start shielding themselves from surveillance of the sort that might affect them.

So predicting "people won't care about privacy because they share their whole lives online more and more" is a bit disingenuous.

It's what the tech companies like Facebook want but it's far from the truth.

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You.” Could be pretty scary if misused.

I've thought for 20 years that the Life Recorder is inevitable. I figured it would be like journaling constantly, getting insight and guidance to improve.

Now I think it will result in unbearable self-consciousness. You will yearn to be offline, quiet, to just forget, maybe to enjoy the moment without it going in your permanent history.

Arguments in relationships are messed up when you can rewind and debate what he said she said. The actual words are often not important, it's the emotions. The permanent record makes it harder to forgive and move on. It's like being in court, everything transcribed.

> given most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online.

There is an entire generation who learned not to post, many who are very anti social media, many who stay anonymous. Chat is much bigger than public social these days.

There are also scenes that avoid digital. They make cassette music and black and white photocopy artwork.

Arguments in relationships was one of the first “off-label” circumstances that came to mind when I saw this post.

Thinking about it a bit past the initial reaction though, I think it’d actually be a massive boon for relationships. Sometimes we get so hung-up on the wording, that may or not may not have been clearly expressive, but due to some slight subtlety, changed the course of the interaction from a potentially positive one to a toxically negative one. I think if you can just subvert the “you did say that! You don’t remember??/No I didn’t/Yes you did” you can focus on the actual content of the conflict resolution.

I’d personally want to know if I said X-potentially-hurtful-thing. Or was the other person just hearing it? What’s workable, what’s not workable. Post-mortems for arguments (assuming the relationship is a viable one, ie genuinely collaborative & not contingent on point-keeping) would be a lot easier & constructive conversations can be realized much more quickly.

I'm not sure people are increasingly willing to share their whole actual lives online, they are mostly presenting a curated and tailored image of themselves to project the self that they want the world to see. 24/7 straight-to-internet type recording doesn't serve that goal very well. I'm not sure that something like this would be popular among streamers, other than maybe a small niche for who that is their whole thing.

I predict future generations (maybe even those being born right now) to start moving away from recording and uploading everything as it's the uncool thing their parents are doing.

Current gen Tiktokers ran away from facebook and instagram, not from oversharing on social media. I think teens will always be very active on some kind of social media, but yes one can certainly hope that all of it is seen in some negative light by the coming generations.

After reading The Circle, I'll definitely pass on sharing my whole live online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com