jpab

For #2, how do you avoid recording all the things people around you are saying throughout the day? Custom microphone to minimise picking up surrounding sounds? Some kind of speaker recognition to identify and isolate your own voice (does that work when you have a cold)?

And if you're not avoiding recording other people, how do you succinctly notify everyone in capture range that you are recording them?

This seems problematic from a standpoint of social norms and etiquette. In public/shared space contexts people know they can be heard by bystanders, but that is very different from being recorded and having your utterances indexed for later retrieval.

I agree wholeheartedly with this concern, but I think there is also a counter-argument too. If you assume we're starting from a situation where there is bias, then you probably want to look for ways to reduce that bias. The software may have an advantage here too.

It may be easier to objectively measure and correct for undesired (racial, or otherwise) bias in an automated system than it is to objectively measure and correct for bias in human judgement. And even if it's more difficult to correct for undesired bias in an automated system, at least that correction is more likely to be permanent and applied uniformly, compared to things like giving training courses for humans, which will vary in effectiveness across the recipients of the course, and will need to be refreshed frequently.

There are a lot of qualifications and "maybe"s in that argument though.

I don't think California is the relevant jurisdiction here.

The quote from ZeniMax in the article is "With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas [...]"

Carmack lives and works in Texas. In fact I think (though I don't have a citation for it) Carmack's choice to stay in Texas is the reason Oculus has a Dallas office. Of course Oculus and Facebook headquarters are in California. ZeniMax headquarters (according to Wikipedia) are in Maryland.