In “What Searchable Speech Will Do To You” , published in Nautilus, James Somers discuss some interesting aspects on the coming possibility of having all we say recorded. And then labeled, tagged, searched…
“We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. (…) It will happen by our standard combination of willing and allowing. It will happen because it can. It will happen sooner than we think.
(…) But would all of this help or hurt us? (…) The more we come to rely on a tool, the less we rely on our own brains.
(…) By offloading more of memory’s demands onto the Record (…) it might not be that we’re making space for other, more important thinking. We might just be depriving our brains of useful material. (…)
The worry, then, is twofold: If you stopped working out the part of your brain that recalls speech (…) your mind would become a less interesting place.
If that’s frightening, consider also what it might be like to live in a society where everything is recorded. (…)
Yes, we will have new abilities—but what we want will change more slowly than what we can do.
Speech recognition has long been a holy grail of artificial intelligence research. (…)
The fact that the problem of recognizing speech seemed to contain within it the whole problem of human understanding (…) it became a benchmark and a prize.
(…)
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are not interested, today, in recording and transcribing everything we say. They are interested in voice as an interface. (…)
This is how it’s going to happen. Speech recognition technology is being driven both by basic research into AI—because it’s a model problem—and by the perceived need of Google and its ilk to create better voice interfaces for their new devices. (…) The only question, then, will be what we decide to record.
(…)
There was almost no privacy 1,000 years ago(…) . Living quarters were dense. Rooms were tiny and didn’t lock. There were no hallways. Other people could overhear your lovemaking. When you traveled, you hardly ever went by yourself; you roamed around in little groups. Most people lived in small towns, where most everybody knew everybody else and gossiped about them. The differences in how we lived between then and now were huge. And yet we adapted. “I gotta figure the changes we’re looking at are small by comparison,” he says. People have always been able to distinguish between their close friends and their less-close friends. They’ve always been able to decide who to trust, and they’ve always found ways to communicate intimacy. They’ve always been able to lie.
(…) Having a Record will just give us a new dimension on which to map a capacity we’ve always had. (…)”