← Back to context

Comment by thomascountz

4 hours ago

At 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?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

15 comments

thomascountz

Reply
ctippett  4 hours ago

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.

  • tclancy  1 hour ago

    Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.

    • jerf  33 minutes ago

      That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.

      I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.

ryandrake  30 minutes ago

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.

PaulHoule  33 minutes ago

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.

wodenokoto  4 hours ago

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.

neutronicus  4 hours ago

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.