I'm the opposite. In movies (and real life to an extent) I have trouble telling people apart. I'd love a closed caption like service that just put name tags over everyone.
That's one of the perpetually-SciFi use cases of Augmented Reality: You're walking around with AR glasses and whenever someone comes into your field of view, your display hovers over them their name, their job, when you last talked to them, what their hobbies are, and so on. A huge privacy nightmare, but useful for people who can't recall names and details about people they've met.
I don't think it'd be a privacy nightmare if it used private databases created by the user. Like a personal CRM, something like Monica, but with a real-time touch.
Wouldn't be from a legal sense, but the societal implications of technology like that becoming commonplace are still immense. The limitations of human memory provide safety in a way today that would quickly erode if everybody could remember exactly everything that's ever been said or seen around them.
I agree with you. I had a bit of a falling out with a friend and wanted to check in on her a few years later. The immediately preceding messages in Messenger were the largely-forgotten unpleasantness. Quite awkward. It really drove home how much of a blessing forgetting every little slight is.
Honestly one of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen, simply because it challenged one of my core beliefs. I’ve always struggled with a poor memory and I’ve tried all kinds of systems to improve retention and recall. This episode challenged the benefits of remembering everything pretty well and made me reconsider.
"You said X 3 years ago, but now you said, which is the opposite of X. How dare you?" is one class of problems. Another is that you can learn quite a bit more about a person than they wished to actually divulge to you if you're able to capture and study their exact behaviors over a long enough stretch of time.
Wait, why are people not allowed to change their mind on something? If anything this would make it more explicit and understandable when people did change their mind on something.
Still privacy nightmare and creepy. There's plenty of public info on people, that once collected and assembled into one place is basically stalking. Not saying it's not a cool idea though :)
And instead of just shrugging it off, you could tag strangers that annoy you and end up with a giant list of grudges against a whole host of people. The false positives (e.g. twins and doppelgangers) should make it interesting.
Which feeds into Saint Motel's song "You're Nobody Til Somebody Wants You Dead" which has a bit about how the list just grows and grows until it's everyone you've ever known...
I had a product idea for an AR app that would do this for everyone who's opted into it. So for real-world networking events, you might choose to disclose some things about yourself but only for that venue and only for some window of time for example.
I never built it, but it's perfectly possible to do.
The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee, and it would then show you others who were in that "market" (of ideas, drugs, sex, whatever). (It might only ask you to pay it if it found someone nearby who matched. And then it would automatically notify the other person unless you paid an ADDITIONAL fee... Not sure about the latter idea, but it was an idea.)
The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.
> The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee
> The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.
No, the genius idea is its major issue, just by paying you gain access to private data (people's preferences) without any kind of chain of trust to make sure that someone is actually part of the group ("market" in your terms) for which they want access to.
By paying you could know that someone around you is looking for cocaine, or is willing to sell sexual services, or is looking to match other people from the same gender, or holds a certain political view against an authoritarian government, etc.
Odd that you think this would happen for my little idea when this hasn't happened for credit cards which is possibly the largest financial incentive possible. To my knowledge, I can't buy a credit score
That would be a good argument over not permitting a unilateral notification of a match (which, at the very least, I wanted to make very expensive and thus profitable, if it's allowed at all). If it notified both people 100% of the time, and one of you was a possible impostor, you could report them. And from a legal standpoint, showing interest in a market doesn't make you guilty. And, you could possibly also build "cred" in one of these tagged "markets" by getting cred from others who say you're legit, and that information would be revealed at the same time (possibly at your discretion).
Makes sense. You still might get honeypots though; could you make cred work more generally with trust between friends, friends of friends etc. without compromising the markets?
So your genius idea is to get people to pay to put themselves on a future blackmail list when your data is leaked/stolen/sold? I have to say, it is a kind of evil genius.
> A Farley file is a set of records kept by politicians on people whom they have met.
> The term is named for James Farley, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager. Farley, who went on to become Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, kept a file on everyone he or Roosevelt met.
> Whenever people were scheduled to meet again with Roosevelt, Farley would review their files. That allowed Roosevelt to meet them again while knowing their spouse, their children's names and ages, and anything else that had come out of earlier meetings or any other intelligence that Farley had added to the file. The effect was powerful and intimate.
> Farley files are now commonly kept by other politicians and businesspeople.
The sad truth is that technology isn't much used to help people. Instead it's used to make money. E.g. there's all this amazing AI, buy my phone keyboard autocorrect has the intelligence of a slug.
> my phone keyboard autocorrect has the intelligence of a slug
iOS 17 already uses a local LLM under the hood for autocorrect and text suggestions. Responses to the change (at least for people who actually noticed it) have been pretty universally positive.
When I first watched Departed, I didn't realise that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters are different people until the third act. It was very confusing.
Loudest thing online is people complaining about minorities existing in TV shows. A much bigger, real problem, is when they regularly cast 3 characters with almost exactly the same skin tone, skin texture, hair color, hair length, hair style, eye color, clothing style, face shape, voice, body type. Then the character's name is given once (if given) and you see several scenes without the character. Several scenes with the clones. Sudden scene with 2 clones in the same scene. You really couldn't give these three white people a different hair style? Make one wear glasses?
I adore X-Ray. It's great for finding songs I like that are played in a video, or figuring out some actor who looks familiar but I can't tell. And of course for remembering character names. I'm honestly so surprised no other streaming services offer a similar feature.
Many years ago there was an MIT startup based on the idea, IIRC, that subliminally flashed names increased recall among cognitively impaired elderly when the flashed names were correct, but didn't negatively impact recall when the flashed names were incorrect. So even quite poor face recognition could be worthwhile.