A Paradoxical Pendant

“Chao, this is not cool”

“California is a dual consent state, this is illegal”

I had screwed up. And now I felt like I was getting pushed out of my own tribe.

A week earlier, I was rapt in anticipation, eagerly awaiting a pendant I had ordered over a year ago. This wasn’t any ordinary pendant. Whenever I wore it, it would record everything it heard and later sync it to my phone. Moreover, it was connected to one of these new-fangled AI large language models, so that I could ask an AI about anything that was recorded.

“How many kids did Rick say he has? I think I met him last week”

“Remind me of the action items from our design meeting”

I have tried many note-taking and information organization software programs that purported to be your second brain, but this seemed more plausible than previous attempts.

The strange thing about this new gadget I’d been looking forward to was that it kind of just disappeared. I would wear it clipped to the top of my T-shirt, but then after a while I wouldn’t even remember I had it on. And so, when a group of us ex-Write of Passage classmates went on a long-anticipated hike, I forgot I was wearing the pendant.

What I should have done was announce to the group that I was wearing the pendant and anything anyone said would be recorded for my personal use. But, alas, I didn’t.

Oops.

It was only when I started talking about gadgets with a fellow hiker that I recalled I was wearing the pendant. I was too socially constipated at that time to announce to the whole group at that moment about my pendant transgression. I finally plucked up the courage to reveal it to the group at the end of the hike, but by then the damage was done, and I deservedly received the shock, scorn, and dismay my fellow writer friends heaped on me.

This was not my first brush with being a social outcast due to my love of cutting-edge tech gizmos. Over 10 years ago, I was one of the first "glassholes."

In 2013, Google Glass was released with much fanfare. It could take pictures and record videos. It even had a tiny screen to offer relevant info like walking directions. Unfortunately, it was largely panned due to privacy concerns and high costs. Folks like me were branded "Glassholes." I recall feeling very self-conscious wearing the device as I went about my daily ordinary life.

But fast forward to the present, and I am happily wearing my Meta Ray-Bans almost every day. As I walk around the streets of Palo Alto listening to my favorite podcasts via these glasses, I don’t even give it a second thought, and, more importantly, no one else does either. There has been no public outcry, even though these glasses take much better pictures and record videos with a much-improved camera and five microphones. In fact, a year after I wrote my love letter about them, they have become increasingly trendy and surprised even Meta/Facebook by becoming their most popular hardware gadget.

This got me thinking that what was once socially unacceptable, or at least frowned upon behavior, has become popular and trendy in just a span of a decade.

That the change in perception is so fast is one reason why it’s so hard to legislate privacy. The European Union has largely been panned for its GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation. A manifestation of this regulation we are all familiar with is the annoying “cookie consent” dialog boxes we see on almost every website.

How many of us just tap whatever button to get rid of whatever is obscuring the page? Is there even a difference if I tap on a different button? How many millions of hours have we wasted with this annoyance? Would the same people fearful of cookie tracking a decade ago now prefer a world where such regulations no longer exist?

Already today, it is socially acceptable to record without consent in certain situations. The body camera worn by police has rocked our preconceptions of law enforcement. In the Central Park Karen incident, a black man, Christian Cooper, didn’t ask for Amy Cooper’s consent to record their interactions regarding her off-leashed dog. Likewise, if a deaf person were using a speech-to-text recording device, they shouldn’t be expected to ask for consent for every conversation they are engaged in, would they?

The funny thing is, at the rate AI is advancing, I could well imagine that, a few years from now, we will all feel a little handicapped if our access to LLMs and AIs were cut off—perhaps akin to not having access to a search engine or Wikipedia today?

If we want AIs to be helpful little assistants in our daily lives, they need to know our daily lives and inner preferences intimately. How else would they know not to book a meeting earlier than 10 a.m. for me, when a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting may be what you prefer? Or to treat me like a five-year-old when teaching me how to fertilize my wife’s orchid but converse with her like the plant expert she is?

In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly posits that while we may resist technological changes in the short term, humans and technology are interdependent and co-evolving in a way that is unstoppable in the long run. He argues that both life and technology are moving towards increasing efficiency, opportunity, complexity, diversity, and, perhaps more controversially, freedom, beauty, and sentience. At this abstract level, resistance is indeed futile.

Norms change. My guess is that a large part of why my friends were upset with me was because they were surprised, and a recording device on a hike is just not the norm.

As we ended our hike, my friend suggested we all do a selfie. No one was afraid that the camera would capture our souls, as some Native Americans believed a couple of centuries ago. Norms change, but in the present, on that fateful hike, I really should have handled it differently.