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>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.

> 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.

Not only is it improbable, it's a complete fantasy. It's not going to happen. And personally, I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme, and that's not even factoring in the inevitable Facebook-esque monetisation.

>when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy

I don't need fantasy to do that. My something nice is being in nature. Walking in the forest. Looking at and listening to the ocean by a small campfire. An absence of stimulation. Letting your mind wander. In peace, away from technology. Which is a long winded way to say "touch grass", but - and I say this sincerely without any snark - try actually doing it. You realise the alleged gloom isn't even that bad. It's healing.

> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme

Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it doesn't necessarily have?

Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is "a machine doing math at scale that allows us to have meaningful relation with human concepts as expressed in a natural language". I don't put anything extra in it, which allows me to say "AI can do good things while avoiding bad things". Surely, a machine can be made to crunch numbers and put words together in a way that helps me rather than harms me.

Oh, and if anything - I don't want "AI" to save me thinking. It cannot do that for me anyway, in principle. I want it to help me do things it machines finally start to do acceptably well: remember and relate things together. This said, yea, I guess I was generous with just a single requirement - now I can see that a personal "AI" also needs its classifications (interpretations) to match with the individual user's expectations as close as possible at all times.

> It's not going to happen.

I can wholeheartedly agree as far as "it is extremely unlikely to happen", but... to say "it is not going to happen", after last five years of "that wasn't on my bingo list"? How can you be so sure? How do we know there won't be some more weird twists of history? Call me naive but I rather want to imagine something nice would happen for a change. And it's not beyond fathomable that something crashes and the resulting waves, would possibly bring us towards a somewhat better world.

Touching grass is important, and it helps a lot, but as soon as you're back - nothing goes anywhere in the meanwhile. The society with all the mess doesn't disappear while we stop looking. So seeking an optimistic possibility is also important, even if it may seem utterly unrealistic. I guess one just have to have something to believe in?

I can imagine a lot of ways we could be using the new tech advancements of the last decade or two in really great ways, but unfortunately I've seen things go in very bad directions almost every time, and I do not have faith that this trend will stop in the future.

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.

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.

Google is almost cartoonishly evil these days. I think that's pretty much an established fact at this point.

I'm not using Gmail, and I don't understand why anyone would voluntarily. It was the worst email client I'd ever used, until I had to use Outlook at my new job.

The only Google products I use are YouTube, because that's where the content is. And Android, because IOS is garbage and Apple is only marginally less evil than Google.

I’ve recently begun using my personal domain as my primary email address, with it forwarding to gmail so I can “get out” easily if I ever had a reason. That said, I’ve found Gmail’s service great, their spam filtering highly effective, (although I haven’t surveyed the competition lately so it’s possible their huge advantage no longer exists) and their features pretty user-friendly (eg the one-click unsubscribe as well as a page to view all your subs in one place). I have never felt like they _abused_ the immense amount of data they have about me nor used it for “evil” purposes; only to profit on relevant ads that are at least clearly marked and unobtrusive. I don’t like that they have so much data on me, but I’ve felt like they’ve been transparent about it, so it’s been on me for making a decision eyes wide open. As opposed to Meta and the shady shit they’ve been caught doing...

That said, I’m open-minded and obviously thinking about this given moving to my own domain.

What’s the evil behavior you’ve experienced? I’m down to move off if I’m oblivious to something…

Yeah the question is what is the optimal feedback loop between producers and consumers and what are the appropriate communivation channels that respect human rights that we can all agree on

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

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

Yes but able bodied people shouldnt decide to use a wheelchair until their legs attrophy and become useless.

I understand the rationale, but don’t you see how this idea contradicts autonomy of decisions for able-minded people? Such good intentions tend to be a pavement on roads to bad places.

I’d rather suggest to inform about all the potential benefits and drawbacks, but leave decisions with the individual.

Especially given that it’s not something irreversibly permanent.

I'd agree but we're closer to getting forced into the chair than making a decision that's right for us

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.

> 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.

Humbly offer this, a cautionary tale perhaps.

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

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

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.