[GrinningFool]

Another case of really cool tech done badly.

Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...

Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you.

Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model of business and ensuring we'll never be able to have that.

[Gooblebrai]

> have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids

"How much outsourcing of your mind do you want to give to technology?" "Yes"

If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.

[john_strinlai]

>If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.

i do not see any practical difference between the hypothetical device the parent proposes and this, except that your suggestion is more cumbersome. you're just "outsourcing your mind" to paper or whatever.

(i will note that i agree with your general point. i try to make a concerted effort to remember those details, rather than rely on any type of note-taking)

[Gooblebrai]

Fair point on the outsourcing. Although I'd argue that one practical difference is that one device doesn't distract you from being present when you have the person in front of you (presumably because you will have to read the details appearing in the glasses).

Also, I take it that the next logical (and worrisome) step to something like that is to record the conversations so the AI can summarise and extract the important data from the conversation for it to be later accessible, which is going to bring us into the ultimate performative scenario. Young people nowadays are already aware that anyone could be recording their most embarrassing moments; recording everything we say would be worse.

[Terr_]

There's this degradation over the last ~30 years from "wow it's like a kind of capital-equipment anyone can own that'll empower them with agency and serve their own individual interests" to "you're renting this product from a supranational corporation so that it can exploit you".

The problem isn't that I'm being recorded by cameras everywhere, the problem is when those silos are broken down to create a panopticon.

[plagiarist]

I don't want superficial interactions with people pretending to remember my birthday or children using details from a fucking glasses summary.

If I wanted to chat with someone pretending to be interested in me I could just answer the door when salesmen come knocking.

[GrinningFool]

If I remember you have two hypothetical kids and one loves robotics and the other loves games; they are 9 and 11; but I can't remember their names no matter how many times I've asked (much to my increasing embarrassment), it doesn't mean I'm pretending to be interested.

In any case the point I was making was more about how the technology we are allowed is not in our service. This was just a use case where having a trustworthy service would be nice, but is impossible.

[plagiarist]

IMO if you remember two kids, rough ages, and their hobbies; you are probably far ahead of needing glasses to make it through the interaction gracefully.

I do agree with your main point, just not for this device. I think this device breaks expectations for socialization in a weird way.

But I am dismayed that it is a cloud device, I am dismayed by all cloud devices, and I am dismayed by people who happily buy it all. I don't know what I'm going to do next time I buy a car, for example.

[reaperducer]

Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...

I already have that. It's called a memory. Came free with my brain.

[recursive-call]

Which is great for you, but a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people. I literally forget how to spell my own name sometimes, keeping track of birthdays is out of the question. But people get really offended if their birthdays go by unnoticed…

[reaperducer]

I literally forget how to spell my own name sometimes

You should see a doctor about that.

a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people

Because they don't try.

30 years ago, it wasn't weird to have 30, 40, even 50 phone numbers memorized. Ask anyone who was alive then. Now people just push the icon for the person they want, allowing their brains to get lazy.

Your brain: Use it or lose it.

[GrinningFool]

> Because they don't try.

Must be nice.

In any case the point of my original post was much more about technology that serves only the user - not any specific use case.

From the replies, I see I could have done a better job of making that clear.

[Atheros]

Remembering someone's birthday and the names of their kids signals that you care about them. If Meta short circuits that then the signal evaporates.