“In that case, if you’re not taking precautions and you lose the device, that could be accessible,” Hsu says. “But that’s very extreme.”
Ultimately, Hsu has greater ambitions for his company than work-focused devices, though he’s careful to point out that this is what they’re concentrating on now, and he’s cognizant of the uneasiness it might cause.
“We have this grand vision, where what happens if users could just record all of the conversations in their daily lives, maybe even after decades,” Hsu says. “If it always listens to you, it learns you, and over time it gets to know your personality, your preferences, your interactions. Someday, you’re going to be able to utilize AI to reproduce yourself—create this real digital twin. That’s kind of this grand mission, where we think if we’re able to help users connect to so many memories, it’s going to be grand.”
It’s clear that AI has the potential to upend much of how humans operate. But some advocates and experts express concern about what happens when these capabilities are entrusted to AI devices—especially ones that are designed to be worn all the time.
In an interview for a previous story about AI gadgets, Jodi Halpern, a professor of bioethics and medical humanities at UC Berkeley likened the trend of offloading human capabilities onto AI devices to the way people don’t need to keep track of directions when they can rely on a service like Google Maps.
“There may be dimensions of human development that just don’t occur anymore,” Halpern says. “Like we don’t develop senses of direction, we may not develop social emotional depth of dealing with people different than ourselves and being empathically curious. If we have a constant feeling that something’s listening and sort of surveilling us, it’s a way to not learn how to be, in a certain way, alone with ourselves.”
All that philosophical grandiosity aside, it still isn’t clear whether people are actually willingly to invest in these kinds of devices in the first place. Plaud has a compelling use case, but it is entering a crowded field where it has to compete with other devices and, well, thousands of apps on smartphones—the devices people already carry around all day.
And users may find that the boring old tools they’re already using are more mature and more effective than any of these splashy inventions.
“Everything that ChatGPT does, it does worse than something else that was designed to do that thing,” Ghosh says. “I think people being gaslit into thinking these systems are more accurate than they are is the main problem.”
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