Meta is reportedly developing what it calls a “super sensing” type of facial recognition technology to its smart glasses lineup. A new report from The Information said that Meta is developing software for the glasses that has the ability to recognize people by name and keep better track of what users are doing throughout the day.
The company originally planned to include similar technology in its first wave of smart glasses, but abandoned that effort due to privacy concerns.
I’ll be honest, shit like this would be pretty handy—if it didn’t also enable more dystopian shit. I’d be happy if it could just remind me of someone’s name and how I know them. Maybe remind me of small talk details. But they aren’t going to stop there…
As always, the ancient Romans had that.
A nomenclator referred to a slave whose duty was to recall the names of persons his master met during a political campaign. Later, the scope was expanded to include names of people in any social context and also other socially important information about them.
A tool that keeps track of people in your life and gives you small talk cues seems dystopian in its self. Relying on that you would just further isolate yourself from others.
Thinking about it, I am pretty sure I would immediately despise anyone who used this tool on me, even apart from the fact that they would be putting me into a meta database without my consent. I would despise people who use this tool for the same reason I despise people who crudely implement the strategies from “How to win friends and influence people”. Their interactions are insincere and manipulative.
But people have different abilities and some of us are REALLY bad at remembering names…uh…Greg.
What does dystopia mean to you? This is akin to having sticky notes to remember things, just in a more compact convenient application. Having social lubricant is also not really a bad thing. If anything it can help people keep from isolating themselves from others.
It can be abused… but then again so can sticky notes. The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the application. Keeping track of friends and colleagues and having simple prompts to encourage interaction is good, keeping databases of dissenters and subjugation tools not so good.
In this particular case, the things I find dystopian are the tendency of a disconcertingly high number of people to allow a tech company to mediate (and eventually monetize) every aspect of their social lives. The point I was making is that if this tool were to experience widespread adoption, even putting aside the massive surveillance and manipulation issues, what will inevitably happen is that a subset of people will come to rely on the tool to the point where they cannot interact with others outside of it. That is bad. Its bad because, it takes a fundamental human experience and locks it behind a pay wall. It is also bad because the sort of interactions that this tool could facilitate are going to be, by their nature, superficial. You simply cannot have meaningful interactions with someone else if you are relying on a crib sheet to navigate an interaction with them.
This tool would inevitably lead to the atrophy of social skills. In the same way that overusing a calculator causes arithmetic skills to atrophy, and in the same way that overusing a GPS causes spatial reasoning skill to atrophy. But in this case it is worse, because this tool would be contributing to the further isolation of people who, judging by the excuses offered in this thread, are already bad at social interactions. People are already lonely and apparently social media is contributing to that trend allowing it to come between you and personal interactions in the face to face world is not going to help.
I really disagree with this analogy. It would be more appropriate to say that this is like carrying around a stack of index cards with notes about people in your life and pulling them out every time you interact with someone. If someone in my life needed an index card to interact with me, I would find that insulting, because it is insincere and dehumanizing. It communicates to others "I don’t care enough about you to bother to learn even basic information about who you are.
I really cannot stand this bromide. We are talking about a company with a track record of using technology to abuse people. They facilitated a genocide (by incompetence, but they clearly did not give a shit). They prey on people when they feel bad. They researched ways to make people feel bad (so they will be easier to manipulate). They design their tools to be addictive and then manipulate and abuse people on their platform. Saying "technology is neutral is the least interesting thing you can say about tech in the context of the current trends of silicon valley. A place whose thought leaders and influencers are becoming ever more obsessed with manipulation, control and fascism. We don’t need to speculate about technology, we already know the applications of this technology won’t be neutral. They will be used to harm people for profit.
Some of us are face blind and this could be helpful.
No fucking way I’d trust meta not to exploit it though, so this is a hard pass.
I see your point but also I just genuinely don’t have a mind for that shit. Even my own close friends and family, it never pops into my head to ask about that vacation they just got back from or what their kids are up to. I rely on social cues from others, mainly my wife, to sort of kick start my brain.
I just started a new job. I can’t remember who said they were into fishing and who didn’t, and now it’s anxiety inducing to try to figure out who is who. Or they ask me a friendly question and I get caught up answering and when I’m done I forget to ask it back to them (because frequently asking someone about their weekend or kids or whatever is their way of getting to share their own life with you, but my brain doesn’t think that way).
I get what you’re saying. It could absolutely be used for performative interactions but for some of us people drift away because we aren’t good at being curious about them or remembering details like that. And also, I have to sit through awkward lunches at work where no one really knows what to talk about or ask about because outside of work we are completely alien to one another.
And it’s fine. It wouldn’t be worth the damage it does. I have left behind all personally identifiable social media for the same reason. But I do hate how social anxiety and ADHD makes friendship so fleeting.
You could then be replaced by an android that just uses this info to interact with those people, instead of yourself. You’d never have to meet ppl again. 5 stars 😄