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?
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...
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.
Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.
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.
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.
Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.
An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.
And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.
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.
There’s a very big difference between opting in to using a tool and having the tool silently start analysing you in the background.
Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI
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.
See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.
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.
I turned autocomplete off for this reason
Did your autocorrect correct “autocorrect” to “autocomplete”?
Autocorrect and autocomplete are two slightly different things IMO. Both of them are in the wordlist on my iPhone also btw.
Autocorrect is when you type a whole word, and then when you hit space the word changes to something else. When it works like it should, it changes typo’d words to the correct spelling. When it doesn’t work, it changes what you wanted to fucking say into something you didn’t mean to ducking say.
Autocomplete is when you type the beginning of a word and the remainder of that word is suggested. And also when you are starting a new word and there are suggestions for the next word to put.
Autocorrect used to be very unreliable many years ago. But to say these days that 1 in 8 words are wrong because of autocorrect or autocomplete, is very far from true. If you see that frequent typos and mistakes like wrong words, it’s because your friends are sloppy texters, not because iOS is corrupting every 8th word they type.
This whole comment was written by me on iOS just like almost all of my other HN comments btw, for reference. And I’m not trying to say I’m some kind of expert writer, far from it. But my mistakes are by the vast majority my own, not because of iOS worsening my words by autocorrecting/autocompleting things in a strange way that somehow degrades the content of my comments. What I do do however, is that I take time to read through what I have written both before and after posting, and editing as necessary. But even those edits are mostly and by a huge margin about fixing my own mistakes or adding more to say, not to fix something iOS messed up in what I wrote.
I considered it intentional, since as a matter of fact "autocomplete" is more correct.
Autocorrupt