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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea (we’ll see about the execs). It seems to record what I would remember anyway (“yesterday you and Joe and Anupam talked about going fishing a chose a date”) unless I was distracted.

It’s like the cameras in the glasses. If all they said is what _I_ know (“That’s Julie who worked in the same group as you at company Z three years ago. You also ran into her at the grocery store shortly after you quit Z and it was awkward” but not tell me anything about Julie I wouldn’t know, like spouse or where she now works or anything like that”) it would be an excellent prosthesis. Public figures have humans who do this for them.

Unfortunately the glasses makers don’t understand the difference and make it too general and privacy destroying. This Apple thing might be OK in my opinion..but the reality remains to be seen.

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I have prosopagnosia. Glasses that could tell me the name of the person talking to me would be amazing. But not if I have to give big tech data about everyone around me

I have it as well. This is how i explain it to regular folks: most people have an whole neural network dedicated to processing the human face, memorizing its feutures and matching them to the people in front of them. But when they look at trees they cant really distinguish a pine tree from another pine tree, unless the differences are extreme: one is brunt down, or has a weird shaped trunk, etc. If they try to recall a specific pine tree all they can recall is a messy green spiky blob. Why? Because their brain has no neural network dedicated to identifying trees. For us, the human face is as distinguishable as a tree

Good way to describe it. Hard to relay to people what it is like walking into a crowded room and not be able to find the people you are meeting without one of them waving.

I try to explain it is a lot like the subway scenes from Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Everyone has the same distorted indistinguishable face.

Very likely I have lost a lot of "new friends" and business contacts from walking past not recognizing them.

When someone comes up with smart glasses with a fully local setup, I'll be the first to buy.

But I'm not wearing something where the content might get viewed by a random person in Nigeria for "cataloging content".

I would love to have AI that can help support my fragmented memory. As my mom said, I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached. However, this requires a lot of TRUST with the company this access. Apple is the only big tech I could trust but I'm still unsure.

Even if you can trust them don’t, you cannot be sure you will trust them tomorrow.

And even if you trust Apple, do you trust the government will not abuse this access? Forever into the future?

Apple has clearly done things that make it impossible for them to comply with such requests by not keeping certain data in the first place and/or doing work locally (in the customer’s device) to which it doesn’t have access. This is even in a couple of cases when the result can be inconvenient for the end user (e.g. they can’t restore lost data).

But you’re right to ask about the future. The new CEO doesn’t appear to have the same attitude towards the customer, but rather considers them to be a revenue source to be mined.

Apple has a track record of doing stuff the difficult way (Maps) or doing it in a way that makes the end result worse than the competition (Siri) just to preserve user privacy. That's why they currently have my trust in these matters.

They're also not an ad company like the two other major players, Alphabet and Meta.

Would you ask Joe and Anupam for their consent to be recorded?

I doubt it and this is the actual problem here with those glasses and now the watch.

Any friend or acquaintance that recorded without consent would probably not be in the friend group for much longer. If you don't trust your friends in the first place that seems the like problem to tackle.

Good question (I thought I implicitly mentioned it but I guess I didn’t).

Does it matter that we’re talking about “recording” within the envelope of typical human capability? I think that distinction does matter and the summary as described is within that region (note: we haven’t seen Apple’s product in the real world, and we know Meta’s is well outside human capability.

Remembering that you talked with Anupam and Joe about fishing is something people do.

Remembering most of the words uttered, specific phrases, etc (the hoary “on your permanent record” joke from RaRHS) is far outside human capability, which is why we have rules about actual recordings.

I consider this kind of capability a kind of prosthetic, like a hearing aid.

By the way I could have scribbled a little note after the conversation (I do this, though these days in my phone): “Joe, Anupam: fishing”. That’s a straight up (if extremely compressed) recording, but no, I would not ask permission for that either.

Not trying to persuade you BTW, just clarifying how I think about the solution space. But don’t forget that the camera case IS handled by human assistants today.

I think you have a nice story there and I wish I could just stop there and be happy with the world.

However, let's be honest. This device will not be your little notebook. This thing will be outside human capability or it would become a joke. This is not you opening a notepad and letting it do speech recognition either. This thing will gather as much information as possible because this is what makes it good and useful. Which is scary in itself.

The tendency to make mistakes but justify them in a very very convincing way is the cherry on top of this nightmare cake.

There are endless ways to use this for bad things and I feel like apple did the same thing, they did with their trackers. They just didn't care.

I'm a SciFi reader and the fact that this exists is no big surprise to me. What is, is the speed in which we got there while simultaneously being in the most unstable political scenery I have ever seen and I grew up during the cold war.

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