[socalgal2]

> I am not a believer in Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future.

I don't know what Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future is but I believe it's basically inevitable that most people will be wearing always on cameras on their face in the future. The same way they carry always on phones today.

The use cases will be too compelling. There have already been demos. Ask the AI watching over your shoulder anything about your past and present and have it act on it.

I'm sure as a hater of that future you don't beleive. For me, I'd pick 2040 as the latest that people wearing always on cameras will be as common as smart phones in 2010 and grow at or faster than smartphones when they get it to actually work and be stylish. I'm not saying I'll enjoy being watched by all of those cameras. I'm saying I don't believe I'll have a choice any more than I have a choice of people having smartphones today.

[alkonaut]

This sounds like a regulation issue to me. If it's regulated it can't be inevitable that "most people" are breaking the law. And if there is a resistance among people then hopefully it will be regulated (I'm talking outside the US now, i.e. where there is a positive correlation between what people in general want and what laws eventually become).

[saikia81]

In the united states the first amendment of the constitution makes it so that any public usage of camera tech cannot be controlled by the state. Except in some very specific scenarios.

[magicalist]

> In the united states the first amendment of the constitution makes it so that any public usage of camera tech cannot be controlled by the state

I'm repeating a comment of mine from another thread, but this is not true. Both recording the audio of a conversation that you aren't party to and deriving biometrics from video without consent are both broad categories that are regulated depending on the state you're doing the "public usage" in.

[alkonaut]

I don't mind anyone taking my photo in a public place. That was always legal. It's what's done with it that could be illegal. E.g. if they use my photo in a commercial without my consent? Illegal.

If it was also illegal to (for example) input a photo of someone non-consenting into any kind of AI model or post it to any other online service? Then I don't see much problem.

[iso1631]

The regulation needs to get ahead of the product, otherwise you'd be criminalising existing behaviour and that doesn't work

People normalised installing spy doorbells, so every doorstep is centrally available to large organisations who want to do harm (government, amazon, meta, whoever)

[alkonaut]

It's inconvenient to make people criminals over night with new regulation, but it's by no means impossible to do so.

I can't install a Ring doorbell if it takes a picture of the street outside my house. That was preexisting regulation (about surveillance cameras requiring permits for public spaces). Of course, people who now install Ring doorbells DO often record the street. But that's more a matter of enforcing the law.

[jclulow]

You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.

[iso1631]

OK you can do a lot of things. It becomes far harder to implement it after it becomes normal

It's easier to ban ring from selling devices in 2010 when nobody had them, then to take them away from millions who feel their personal benefits of not having to get off the couch to see who's at the door outweighs the societal harm.

That's before the arguments about societal benefits (coperganda does well at this). You change the argument from a hypothetical "this could help stop crime" to a concrete example "in this case we found out who robbed little old granny thanks to our surveillance network".

[Applejinx]

But their willingness to just make stuff up has escalated so far… I don't think copaganda has the effectiveness it once had. It's gotten burned through gratituous abuse.

[sublinear]

That's way off base.

There's a very significant chunk of people who rarely if ever use the camera on their phone right now. It's not even a matter of who they are or their personal opinions. Cameras simply aren't an exclusive gateway to anything critically important. In many cases a photo or video is an objectively worse format than text.

Smartphones became common because they are now the only way to access certain information or authenticate. It's to the extent that we eliminated hard copy documents and changed publishing and proving identity irreversibly. People frequently use smartphones because they have to, and a smartphone without a working camera is still perfectly usable and always will be.

This isn't a matter of the public being wooed by a sales pitch or wanting anything in particular. Images require less accessible and reliable methods of interpretation to convey information whereas text is the information. If you're not convinced then consider that both can be generated by AI. A generated image can be convincing and so can generated text, yet we depend on special forms of text such as keys which cannot be generated by AI and any image trying to encode the same is always inferior. An image is never acceptable as a sole or even primary means of authentication. For all these reasons and more, an image is never the only format available.

[sprinkly-dust]

I would disagree that a smartphone without a working camera is perfectly usable. A lot of the world — especially in developing countries — runs on QR Codes for everything from restaurant menus to electronic payments. Without a camera, other stuff too, like KYC, just doesn't work. These are the sorts of changes that, as you mentioned, are forcing people to use smartphones. And they rely on the camera.

[sublinear]

QR codes can be unreliable and unnecessary to convey a URL. That's why I said "an image is never the only format available". If it's a deliberate thing people must pay attention to, the friction is already too high.

Most QR codes are not permalinks. Nobody wants to print out another one or retry scanning with better lighting only to find it doesn't work. When it really matters the link is dynamic and invisible. It's baked into a script your phone runs when you perform a more interesting higher level task in an app, tap-to-pay when you arrive, etc.

[latexr]

The pushback to and ultimate failure of Google Glass proves it’s not inevitable.

[saikia81]

The fact that every new technology has had pushback before adoption makes your claim meaningless.

[latexr]

That is simply not true. There was no pushback for washing machines or vacuum cleaners or refrigerators, to name just a few.

Furthermore, the point isn’t the pushback but the ultimate failure and thus lack of adoption. I feel like that’s fairly obvious.

This idea that all new tech faces pushback is at best ignorant and at worst a wilful deception to justify every draconian idea pushed forward by tech bros who only care about extracting money from people at all costs.

[swiftcoder]

> There have already been demos. Ask the AI watching over your shoulder anything about your past and present and have it act on it.

Demo, or verbatim plot of Black Mirror episode?

[socalgal2]

Demo.

As much I enjoyed Black Mirror I thought it's Season 1, "The Entire History of You" entertaining but was poorly conceived. It showed catching your partner cheating as a "would rather not know" thing and it ignored any possible positives. The episode wasn't really about the tech, it was about a failing relationship, a cheating partner, and an untrusting obsessive person.

In any case, in that world, which didn't have AI to review and catalog what you saw but only playback of recorded sight, positives they could have mentioned

* an end to almost all date rape - since it would be recorded - leaving only the ambiguous cases

* a likely decrease in various crimes - since they'd all be recorded

* harder for execs/government to make backroom deals - since they're be recordings of them

* might end gaslighting in personal relationships

* eyewitness reports/testimony would be way more reliable

* medical symptom checking - when did some symptom start would be recorded

* better performance review - like a pilot reviewing a training landing or an athlete reviewing their own performance.

* proof of abuse by customers or by staff.

* checking your actual time spent vs you're perceived time spent - I studied for 4 hours, checking though you studied for 45 minutes and kept getting distracted with non-study

* less lost items - check where you left your keys, etc....

* more accountable police - everyone is recording them

* no more need to take photos for memos, since you know everything you looked at is recorded

* all car accidents recorded - easier to determine blame

Of course adding AI to all of that would add orders of magnitude more usefulness.

I'm not saying there are no downsides. As one example, every bowl movement, shower, self pleasure, sex, cold, vomit, misspoke word, awkward situation, etc would be also recoreded.

[latexr]

> The episode wasn't really about the tech, it was about a failing relationship, a cheating partner, and an untrusting obsessive person.

Good (or decent) science fiction is never about the tech, but about its impact on people.

[swiftcoder]

Yes, this is sort of the point. Technology in science fiction is just there as a lens through which to observe humanity (if the point were the technology itself, we'd be writing science-fantasy instead). Not clear that a bunch of the people in charge of bringing tech products to market understand this distinction (see also, Torment Nexus).

[socalgal2]

And this tech in the show had zero impact. The guy would have had the same issues with or without the tech. The rest of society was doing fine in that episode and nearly everyone had the tech

[itishappy]

The impact isn't felt by most. That's the point.

Most people in China get along fine with their social credit system. I don't think that's an argument for the tech in Nosedive (S03E01).

[saikia81]

because the tech is hard to envision right (or sci-fi writers would be rich), but the consequences are clearer

[socalgal2]

There weren’t any consequences of the tech shown. There as just a justifiably untrusting person catching their partner’s infidelity. They’d have had problems anyway. The tech didn’t cause or exacerbate the issue.

To point out it was this particular person’s issue and not the tech, everyone one else in tbe show also had the tech yet were doing fine. They were shocked when they meet one person who didn’t have it. so clearly from the writing itself it was normalized and no one was having issues, otherwise they’d have all brought up the issues

[latexr]

No, it’s because it aims to be a relatable, compelling story, and not a technical instructions manual.

Not everyone thinks about getting rich all the time.

[sublinear]

And yet we live in a world where even a basic surveillance camera, dashcam, or bodycam are often broken, missing, or turned off.

It's not always nefarious. The friction is just too high and people don't actually care about any of those things you listed as much as you might believe. If they did, we'd just as easily employ people performing audits on every interaction of every waking moment since the beginning of humanity. A nanny, if you will.

In the real world, simplicity wins. You can say it's irrational all you want. Nobody cares. Cost, reliability, and impedance are more important. No amount of engineering or economy of scale will overcome those things. Doing nothing is always an option and so this is all ultimately political.

What humanity has learned again and again is that trust is too important and intrinsic to leave it up to politics. All that will result in is brittle rules that are easily abused worse than the original problem they intended to solve. It's much easier to convince people to socialize accordingly and ignore or punish the people who refuse to comply.

Making sure that every decision in a flowchart leads somewhere is not necessarily valuable or even desirable to anyone.

[socalgal2]

I did’t say anyone wanted those things. I said they were positives the show ignored and don’t require AI

with Ai added the use cases are so compelling they fly off th shelves once they get the form and ux right.

Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s and yet here we are in 2025 an 85% of the planet has a PDA, renamed smartphone

[sublinear]

> Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s

No it wasn't. PDAs were seen as crappy little computers, but the applications were obvious because the bigger much more impressive computers were everywhere by then. There was no question about the value of personal computing anymore.

Everything regarding probabilistic AI is either about optimization or trading off costs. All such applications are intrinsically and perpetually lost in the weeds. The use cases aren't new because "generative" is a marketing buzzword desperately trying to cover up what is actually just "imitation".

AI makes what was already possible more accessible. It is useful, but not a revolution for the layperson or even most businesses apart from bridging knowledge gaps. It's a new way to search, but iterative at best. People are in awe of the money being exchanged, but are also in denial that it's almost entirely defense spending.

If it was just a matter of cost, scale, capability, etc. then why am I not allowed to own a flying car with my existing driver's license? Why doesn't everyone own full auto guns? Why do we serve horrible food in hospitals? Why do corporate offices thrive on work that technically never needed more than one person to accomplish even before computers were commonplace? The answers are all political.