WIRED: "How not to make friends: wear a Friend pendant"
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If the idea of a microphone-packed wearable that’s always listening to your conversations raises privacy concerns for you, just know that you’re not alone. If your experience is anything like ours, wearing the Friend will likely earn you the ire of everyone around you. Curiously, you might even end up being bullied by the chatbot itself.
Ouch. Quite the review!
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I think there's possibly some reasonable use case for these in bounded spaces, such as a workplace or other conference where the presence of these sort of devices is publicized well in advance.
But wearing in one's personal life? LOL. I love AI stuff in general and am excited about augmented memory and all that, but there's no way around this being creepy at the moment and I would be very uncomfortable engaging with someone in a personal (non-professional) context who was wearing something like this.
EDITED TO ADD:
Just read the article. Ouch indeed. It's clear that this company needs some adult supervision at minimum.
@thatadamguy I wonder if anything like this can be created by a single man or even by a whole ai research company.
I like the idea from a transparency perspective, maybe politicians should wear them 24/7. :D
The founder being "vocally unconcerned about critical feedback" might be at play here. iIt's important to have trusted advisors whose judgement you can rely on.
Paying to wear your insecurities around your neck.
Can't say im comfortable with this. I dont think this company will get far, the idea is great in theory but clearly they dont understand humans are not comfortable with this. Imagine you going to a psychologist and they telling everyone about all your dark secrets that you go to them about to express but they are not allowed to tell anyonee of this. This is cool idea for transparency and flexibility, but really bad in reality, this wont get liftoff.
That would seem unethical to me, and someone knew you were wearing such a device, I am sure they would be very reserved when they had conversation with anyone wearing such a device.