Does the CEO and co-founder of Bond actually expect folks who read this announcement, as it shifts from Facebook's ambient data collection toward promoting Bond, to give Bond access to their valuable "identity capital" and sign up because they promise to give us more control over how we share our memories with AI and "provide a safe medium" via closed source? Absolutely not. Keep your superpowers offline with a local model.
The idea of capturing your memories and letting AI sort through them, tag etc is sort of interesting. But yeah, you can kind of already do this if you really want to with some voice to text and Obsidian and then you don't have to worry that some SF bro is going to break his pinky promise and give your "memories" to the NSA.
Reducing your whole life down to a "memory currency" is supposed to be a "superpower"? How? It gave excellent examples of other tools that gave us superpowers: GPS, Phone, Internet. But didn't provide a single shred of evidence that this app is also a superpower.
This is an app. Not a protocol, not a platform, an app.
It's just... a way to remember stuff? You're handing all this data to a company, relying on "trust me bro, we'll be responsible" as a promise to be ethical?
You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."
What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?
It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on
Before Grubhub, did you feel that way about pizza delivery?
> are in fact damaged by people buying everything online
You enjoyed ordering from mail order catalogs?
Reality check: Before online shopping became a thing, the vast majority of towns in the US did not have a store that had everything you wanted to buy. You had to find a potential dealer in town, get them to order it for you, and pay a premium for that service.
I lived for a number of years in a town that had no FedEx or UPS office. So if you missed a delivery that required a signature, you'd have to drive to the town that did - a 45 minute drive (and in winter, a risky drive if there was snow).
I didn't have a car, so I had to make sure I'm there for 3-4 hours or longer awaiting delivery. If I missed it (I never did), it simply meant the product would get returned, and I'd pay the vendor some kind of fee (restocking, shipping, whatever). It's only the convenience of the Internet that solved some of these problems.
Are there downsides to everything you mentioned? Sure. There are upsides to all of them as well. You're taking a multifaceted concept and reducing it down, not even to a continuum, but to a binary.
I too can't detect the meaningful qualitative differences that might emerge from changes in prevalence or intensity of a given behavior.
Next up: Oh drinking alcohol is an enjoyable social activity? Well tell that to my uncle who drank 4 liters of vodka and DIED.
I made no such binary distinction, not sure what you're accusing me of.
I am in fact making the same argument you are: there are pros and cons. This was made in rebuttal to the prior comment, which suggested that the people who said "there are cons" or even "there may be cons" have been consistently proven wrong.
Your last paragraph is a valid rebuttal - and I've done what you did in the first 3.
Your last paragraph was great. But your first 3 serve no one but you.
My suggestion for your future, if you'll consider it, is to still always write those first 3 paragraphs (or their future incarnations - because they feel good!), but after you have, take a deep breath and delete them.
And if you don't like my suggestion, well, that decision has pros and cons too.
You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.
That, is also a thought terminating cliche. Sure we want to choose what we spend time on, however, we don't know what experiences will meaningfully contribute to our lives. It is only after we have gone through them that we realize which ones were significant. And these vary for everyone.
umm, its like the hallmark of adulthood to learn that life is a lot about doing things you don't want to do. There's obviously a spectrum. And I don't mean forcibly through coercion. I mean yeah it sucks to wake up early and clean up and get your exercise in and be accountable to your team or take your kid to basketball practice or feed the cat. Or go out your way to pick up that trash someone else threw out, or let someone go ahead of you in traffic even though you were there first or take the stairs because someone is moving in today and needs the elevator more than you or take your dad to dialysis and listen to him mention the same things 5 times, there and back or not just eat anything you want whenever you want.
I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.
You left out washing your clothes in the river, carrying water from the well, butchering a chicken for dinner, walking ten miles uphill both ways and a whole lot of things that you seem to have automated away.
haha you're right! That is the entire nuance of the discussion. There's a line somewhere in there. And it's not as pedantic as it seems. I still do cook my own food. I don't grow it and butcher the meat. But thousands of years of cooking people still cook food. (and not me but people do still grow their own food).
Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?
And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>
What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?
Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?
A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.
You are reacting to the author reacting to Zuck reacting to Zuck's daughter mentioning she uses AI to help plan recipes. It's a one-sentence, third-hand anecdote in a large article that folks in here are fixating on because of bike shedding.
Maybe Zuck's daughter appreciates cooking differently than you do. If AI helps her enjoy the part she likes about cooking by getting her past whatever friction would make her less likely to cook otherwise, then good for her.
Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?
For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.
My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.
Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.
Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.
Your comment reminds me of a (single) friend who talked about how he doesn't use dishwashers because he finds the motions of washing them by hand therapeutic.
That's because he rarely cooked, and ate out often. When you get married, cook almost every day, and have kids, washing dishes by hand becomes anything but therapeutic.
Do you have a kid? How often are you cooking for the kid? Doing it multiple times a week for 15+ years becomes a chore. Most of the meals you cook aren't well thought out - they're "Family needs to be fed - what's the quickest thing I can make?" Then, once in a while, you want to put in the effort and cook something nice, and it becomes meaningful. Those have always been the exceptions when both parents have full time jobs.
Getting an algorithm to plan the recipe and order ingredients is for all the other times you cook. Not for the meaningful ones.
It's also not an either/or. You have the freedom to do it as often or as little as you want.
Now here's my question: Say only 10% of the meals you cook are carefully thought out. 90% are done with your brain on autopilot. Are you going to criticize someone for now doing a 10-30-60 split, where the 30% is using some algorithm to actually make something nice for the kid? You're not losing any of the meaningful time you had before.
Another way to frame this: Overworked parents decide to take the family out for junk food once in a while. It's a treat for the kids, and it's a way for the parents to get relief. It's simply another way of outsourcing the labor, just as the AI example is. Do you criticize such parents saying that instead of meaningfully trying to make a nice dinner, they're offloading it to a 3rd party?
The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...
“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.
Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!
I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!”
But will you?”
Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.
An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.
Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.
I’d take it further and say there’s nothing inherently wrong with information gathering software
The issue is that the data is not owned or controlled by the person generating it and all benefits accrue to giant systems like corporations and governments.
For example if a car rental company has my ID on file, dozens of my selfies from every time I rented, audio and video data from my trips, on one hand they are spying on me, not letting me delete the data, so it benefits them because they have all this intelligence on their customer.
On the other hand because they have that intelligence, I can be more easily approved and get into a car faster than the average person. They already know what kind of driver I am, that I’m clean, I fill up the tank, bring it back on time. I don’t have to do any work to provide that proof, and don’t have to go through delays, hit my credit report, or pay security deposits since they can just look at what kind of driver I am.
There are some cases the user shouldn’t be entitled to delete data about them - or at least it should be lawful to enter into such agreements.
The only time I think it’s unfair and should be regulated is advertising and dynamic pricing. All things related to targeted ads feels like a misuse of technology - and yet I don’t mind it if two people mutually enter into an agreement where both parties benefit, or at the very least the user is compensated.
When you convert from an ad to buy something, a rebate of some small amount should credit to your account to compensate for being profiled/tracked and served the ad you converted on. Paid for by the profiling/tracking/ad serving company (out of the revenue from the advertiser).
Does the CEO and co-founder of Bond actually expect folks who read this announcement, as it shifts from Facebook's ambient data collection toward promoting Bond, to give Bond access to their valuable "identity capital" and sign up because they promise to give us more control over how we share our memories with AI and "provide a safe medium" via closed source? Absolutely not. Keep your superpowers offline with a local model.
The idea of capturing your memories and letting AI sort through them, tag etc is sort of interesting. But yeah, you can kind of already do this if you really want to with some voice to text and Obsidian and then you don't have to worry that some SF bro is going to break his pinky promise and give your "memories" to the NSA.
I was with you all the way up until how you pivot to ad advertorial and become the exact thing you are complaining about.
If you can’t beat them, join them right?
Reducing your whole life down to a "memory currency" is supposed to be a "superpower"? How? It gave excellent examples of other tools that gave us superpowers: GPS, Phone, Internet. But didn't provide a single shred of evidence that this app is also a superpower.
This is an app. Not a protocol, not a platform, an app.
It's just... a way to remember stuff? You're handing all this data to a company, relying on "trust me bro, we'll be responsible" as a promise to be ethical?
This is beyond perplexing.
You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."
What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?
Thanks to people pioneering this I can spend a lot more time on the things I want.
" It plans his daughter’s recipes and orders the ingredients."
Believe or not people pay for others to do this for themselves.
I think OPs question still applies.
> What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this?
And the person you are replying to answered it.
Many, many people outsource things like meal prep.
Which is the sad part.
People said this about every new convenience, such as email over physical mail, buying things online instead of in stores, etc. It's a tired argument.
It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on
> ordering food delivery,
Before Grubhub, did you feel that way about pizza delivery?
> are in fact damaged by people buying everything online
You enjoyed ordering from mail order catalogs?
Reality check: Before online shopping became a thing, the vast majority of towns in the US did not have a store that had everything you wanted to buy. You had to find a potential dealer in town, get them to order it for you, and pay a premium for that service.
I lived for a number of years in a town that had no FedEx or UPS office. So if you missed a delivery that required a signature, you'd have to drive to the town that did - a 45 minute drive (and in winter, a risky drive if there was snow).
I didn't have a car, so I had to make sure I'm there for 3-4 hours or longer awaiting delivery. If I missed it (I never did), it simply meant the product would get returned, and I'd pay the vendor some kind of fee (restocking, shipping, whatever). It's only the convenience of the Internet that solved some of these problems.
Are there downsides to everything you mentioned? Sure. There are upsides to all of them as well. You're taking a multifaceted concept and reducing it down, not even to a continuum, but to a binary.
I too can't detect the meaningful qualitative differences that might emerge from changes in prevalence or intensity of a given behavior.
Next up: Oh drinking alcohol is an enjoyable social activity? Well tell that to my uncle who drank 4 liters of vodka and DIED.
I made no such binary distinction, not sure what you're accusing me of.
I am in fact making the same argument you are: there are pros and cons. This was made in rebuttal to the prior comment, which suggested that the people who said "there are cons" or even "there may be cons" have been consistently proven wrong.
Your last paragraph is a valid rebuttal - and I've done what you did in the first 3.
Your last paragraph was great. But your first 3 serve no one but you.
My suggestion for your future, if you'll consider it, is to still always write those first 3 paragraphs (or their future incarnations - because they feel good!), but after you have, take a deep breath and delete them.
And if you don't like my suggestion, well, that decision has pros and cons too.
but why is it a tired argument?
You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.
i have and continue to build a ton of automations against my life. my goal is to offload more and more of my "life" to it.
- bills? bookkeeping? reading DMARC emails? yeah, i want to do none of it, but i desperately want these chores done.
- spend time with kids? study interesting topics? eat and drink interesting things? i want more of this.
life is what happens during all the waiting for life to happen.
That's a nice thought terminating cliché.
We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.
> I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.
I do. It's easy, fun and they're nicer (lower water content) than supermarket ones. You don't even need a garden. Can recommend.
There was bound to be one! I wasn't talking to you though.
>> I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.
That, is also a thought terminating cliche. Sure we want to choose what we spend time on, however, we don't know what experiences will meaningfully contribute to our lives. It is only after we have gone through them that we realize which ones were significant. And these vary for everyone.
Isn't it great when we get to try something instead of having to try it?
umm, its like the hallmark of adulthood to learn that life is a lot about doing things you don't want to do. There's obviously a spectrum. And I don't mean forcibly through coercion. I mean yeah it sucks to wake up early and clean up and get your exercise in and be accountable to your team or take your kid to basketball practice or feed the cat. Or go out your way to pick up that trash someone else threw out, or let someone go ahead of you in traffic even though you were there first or take the stairs because someone is moving in today and needs the elevator more than you or take your dad to dialysis and listen to him mention the same things 5 times, there and back or not just eat anything you want whenever you want.
I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.
You left out washing your clothes in the river, carrying water from the well, butchering a chicken for dinner, walking ten miles uphill both ways and a whole lot of things that you seem to have automated away.
haha you're right! That is the entire nuance of the discussion. There's a line somewhere in there. And it's not as pedantic as it seems. I still do cook my own food. I don't grow it and butcher the meat. But thousands of years of cooking people still cook food. (and not me but people do still grow their own food).
Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?
And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>
Freedom to decide? Not that humanity is historically great at deciding what brings itself happiness.
Humanity or humans? Individual humans could, but as a collective we make stupid choices.
Humans are quite bad at doing what brings them (durable) happiness
What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?
Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?
A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.
What a miserable mindset.
You are reacting to the author reacting to Zuck reacting to Zuck's daughter mentioning she uses AI to help plan recipes. It's a one-sentence, third-hand anecdote in a large article that folks in here are fixating on because of bike shedding.
Maybe Zuck's daughter appreciates cooking differently than you do. If AI helps her enjoy the part she likes about cooking by getting her past whatever friction would make her less likely to cook otherwise, then good for her.
Isn't it a bit of a spectrum of ways to tackle this depending on tons of other factors?
For example, baking cookies with my 3 year old means having them help with a couple steps of mixing before interest is lost until the cookies are done. The whole act of planning, shopping, and prepping the kitchen is mostly entirely left out. Now with my 8 year old, the entire "workflow" of "lets bake cookies" to cookies complete is easily done end to end with the child.
My point is the level of "automation" desired for various repetitive tasks in life ebbs and flows on a multitude of external factors. This week I might have a lot going on and don't want to deal with grocery shopping and next week I might be free to go take care of that myself, and find joy in browsing the produce section.
Provided "agents" like these can have interactions where the principle still has agency over which tasks they will or will not do, I don't really see the issues.
Now the whole idea of negotiating this on a day by day basis with the agent and managing said agent sounds like a chore in and of itself and so I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.
Your comment reminds me of a (single) friend who talked about how he doesn't use dishwashers because he finds the motions of washing them by hand therapeutic.
That's because he rarely cooked, and ate out often. When you get married, cook almost every day, and have kids, washing dishes by hand becomes anything but therapeutic.
Do you have a kid? How often are you cooking for the kid? Doing it multiple times a week for 15+ years becomes a chore. Most of the meals you cook aren't well thought out - they're "Family needs to be fed - what's the quickest thing I can make?" Then, once in a while, you want to put in the effort and cook something nice, and it becomes meaningful. Those have always been the exceptions when both parents have full time jobs.
Getting an algorithm to plan the recipe and order ingredients is for all the other times you cook. Not for the meaningful ones.
It's also not an either/or. You have the freedom to do it as often or as little as you want.
Now here's my question: Say only 10% of the meals you cook are carefully thought out. 90% are done with your brain on autopilot. Are you going to criticize someone for now doing a 10-30-60 split, where the 30% is using some algorithm to actually make something nice for the kid? You're not losing any of the meaningful time you had before.
Another way to frame this: Overworked parents decide to take the family out for junk food once in a while. It's a treat for the kids, and it's a way for the parents to get relief. It's simply another way of outsourcing the labor, just as the AI example is. Do you criticize such parents saying that instead of meaningfully trying to make a nice dinner, they're offloading it to a 3rd party?
The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...
Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.
After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.
Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?
No thanks. And starting by asskissing zuck says you are trying to get acquired by fb, or will be in the future, which is even worse.
> Zuckerberg promises an agent that understands you, your goals, everything you care about.
I.e. the most dangerous program you can imagine.
I wrote this in 2018:
AI and privacy are incompatible
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/artificial-intelligence-an...
Highlight towards the end
“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.
Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!
I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!” But will you?”
You guys have it backwards.
Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.
An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.
Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.
Correct!
I’d take it further and say there’s nothing inherently wrong with information gathering software
The issue is that the data is not owned or controlled by the person generating it and all benefits accrue to giant systems like corporations and governments.
Some benefit accrues to the user too.
For example if a car rental company has my ID on file, dozens of my selfies from every time I rented, audio and video data from my trips, on one hand they are spying on me, not letting me delete the data, so it benefits them because they have all this intelligence on their customer.
On the other hand because they have that intelligence, I can be more easily approved and get into a car faster than the average person. They already know what kind of driver I am, that I’m clean, I fill up the tank, bring it back on time. I don’t have to do any work to provide that proof, and don’t have to go through delays, hit my credit report, or pay security deposits since they can just look at what kind of driver I am.
There are some cases the user shouldn’t be entitled to delete data about them - or at least it should be lawful to enter into such agreements.
The only time I think it’s unfair and should be regulated is advertising and dynamic pricing. All things related to targeted ads feels like a misuse of technology - and yet I don’t mind it if two people mutually enter into an agreement where both parties benefit, or at the very least the user is compensated.
When you convert from an ad to buy something, a rebate of some small amount should credit to your account to compensate for being profiled/tracked and served the ad you converted on. Paid for by the profiling/tracking/ad serving company (out of the revenue from the advertiser).
<s> I'm glad they are completely not creepy for a company that plans to make money by selling your private data. </s>
"Capture the daily moments that define you. Voice the hidden details and tell the story only you can tell."
"We may sell, transfer or otherwise share [..] including personal information"
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