Get A Notebook Bro
Wednesday Apple had a big event to unveil their new iPhones, Apple Watches and Airpods. Something I will cover soon™. But there was something very notable to me that shows up a trend in the tech industry in general.
The most notable example was the Apple Watchs new Live Rewind feature, they claim will listen in the background to people speaking to you and conversations you are having allowing you to view a transcription of the last 15 seconds. Apple claims that these features do not create or store audio recordings and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple.
What apple claims is largely irrelevant. Many non techy people (and techy people for that matter) are convinced that their phone is already listening to them and now Apple have released a feature that actually advertises that it does just that.
Apples new Live Rewind feature in action.
The feature is going to be opt in to start with but whos to say if in the future they may decide to have this on at all times. Clearly this is a shot across the bow at things like the plaud note pin, limitless pin and other AI transcription wearable devices. The biggest difference though is those are separate devices and while yes they are small and could be hidden that would reduce the function of the device. This however is now built in to all the supported apple watches and there is zero way to know if the person you're talking to has this enabled.
Pretty quickly I can see this becoming a big backlash much like the way that meta ray bans are easy to record people with secretly, soon I could see apple watches being banned from certain spaces where sensitive information may be shared.
The issue I find with all these features on all these devices about helping you out is there's an easy and cheap way to do this that has existed since the 13th centenary, that takes no batteries, and can survive being dropped, stood on and being shoved in your back pocket and sat on and its called a notebook .
Learning to take notes is a great lifeskill, you dont need to write war and peace every time but you can jot a short thing to spark your memory when you come back to it later. Which is the other side of this. Heavy AI use is still being studied in terms of the effects on the human mind, but its generally the consensus that using AI as a crutch means that your brain functions can atrophy.
Note taking however has the opposite effect. Taking notes increases your ability to absorb information as well as your memeory retention as the act of writing things down will also help you to remember it more when the time comes to recall that information.
The best bit though is that taking notes is a private thing both in the sense that it does not encroach on anyone else's privacy and that your notes can never be used to feed the AI slop machine new information, they cannot be hacked, they cannot be viewed with investigatory powers without your knowledge.
Last Edited: 0 minutes ago.