Pablo_Stafforini comments on New Year's Predictions Thread - Less Wrong

18 Post author: MichaelVassar 30 December 2009 09:39PM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 30 December 2009 10:56:58PM 17 points [-]

A killer application for augmented reality is likely to be the integration of communication channels. Today's, cellular phones annoy people with constant accountability and stress, not to mention spotty coverage, but if a HUD relay over life can display text messages as they are sent and invite fluid shifts to voice conversation. When video is engaged and shared, people could also see what their potential conversation partner is doing prior to requesting attention, giving distributed social life some of the fluidity and contextual awareness of natural social life. These sorts of benefits will motivate the teenagers of 2020 to broadcast much of their lives and to interpret the absence of their friend's data streams as a low intensity request not to call. Archival will at first be a secondary but relatively minor benefit from the technology, but will ultimately widen the divide between public and private life, a disaster for privacy advocates but a boon for academic science (by normalizing the publication of all data). Paranormal beliefs will also tend to decline, as the failure to record paranormal events and the fallibility of memory both become more glaring.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 01 January 2010 04:19:53PM *  2 points [-]

Robin Hanson makes a similar prediction in 'Enhancing Our Truth Orientation' (pp. 362-363):

Humans have long worked to document their lives, inventing gadgets to aid in writing and recording, concepts and conventions to make what we say meaningful and comparable, and social institutions to let us coordinate in monitoring and verifying our documentation. It is harder to lie, and so to self-deceive, about documented events. [...] Many lament, and some celebrate (Brin, 1998), a coming ‘‘surveillance society.’’ Most web pages and email are already archived, and it is now feasible and cheap for individuals to make audio recordings of their entire lives. It will soon be feasible to make full video recordings as well. Add to this recordings by security cameras in stores and business, and most physical actions in public spaces may soon be a matter of public record. Private spaces will similarly be a matter of at least private record.