alt Hacker NewsAt one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.
A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.
If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.
With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?
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I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.
I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.
I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI
See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.
Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.
I guess that those days are soon over.
Autocorrect has had the opposite effect IMO, there’s an expectation that like 1 in 8 words from an iPhone user are not what the sender intended.
Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.
This thought path has been explored by the Black Mirror series in the episode The Entire History of You.
https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...