With such technology, we are becoming less and less like human beings and more like technological beings augmented with a biological base. I think it's a bad thing because at least the average human being in modern society is not brought up with wisdom, but only the drive to advance technology and operate in a highly capitalistic world.
The augmentation of human beings with tech like this is a proto-type for a dismal world where wisdom is lacking and the pure pursuit of knowledge is becoming a more and more seductive path to destruction.
It's an efficient way, but I vehemently disagree with "just". No technology is "just" anything. All of these little "improvements" constitute a very advanced modification of human beings to become more mechanical and less empathetic towards life.
Cyber augmentation (hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc.) are often a means to become more empathetic, because it allows deeper connections.
As someone who suffers from ADD, I simply won't be able to recall forever everything someone and I said, so I use technological augmentation in the form of writing down birthdays, for example. When I'm at meetups, when a conversation huddle ends, I'll write down notes, or more likely, send a custom linkedin connection request mentioning what we talked about.
The result is that we have the same, empathetic, human conversation as before, and also next time we talk, I can ask them about their startup or hobby, and also I wish them a happy birthday every year, which I think is a net positive without any downsides.
A common rebuttal, but I don't think the tradeoff (on average) is worth it when the technology becomes sufficiently advanced. (Of course, it's worth it for some people, but the resulting technology makes society worse on average.)
And you are forgetting all the destructive technology required to get to the "benign" ones.
Negative trade-offs are not directly related to individual products, but to the technology they depend on and the technology that can follow from them, plus our tendency in capitalistic society to invent whatever can be invented for incremental advantages. For example, AI note taking (benign) requires AI (overall bad) and can imply future technologies (greater surveillance). The bad parts cannot be separated from the good in modern global capitalism because we have no oversight mechanism to do so.
Cyber augmentation already exists, and it's going to be used for what it's going to be used for.
In my case, it's being used in the way I described, increasing the depth of human connections. So the question is, how does my usage result in "human beings to become more mechanical and less empathetic towards life"?
Its hard for me to see how you could think it is “just” taking notes.
Objectively the notes are being constructed and filtered by an external 3rd party (even if it is run on device locally, someone external is still training and choosing the agent).
It is the homogenization of thought and note taking of everyone using AI to record their lives that is the potential problem.
Arguably this kind of viewpoint can be particuarly interesting to this group. People are well placed to see some of the more worrying aspects of technology.
I understand exactly what everyone else does here. And nothing intrinsically wrong with that -- technology is unquestionably fun and interesting. I like programming myself. BUT, and this is a huge BUT, I think we as people who are well versed in technology should take a little more responsibility for what we create.
As knowledge becomes more powerful in the sense of enabling us to do more things, it becomes more tempting to use it to gain short-term advantages that typically have long-term detrimental consequences. Such as AI for example, which is too quick at disrupting employment or cheap energy to generate bitcoin but is problematic for local energy grids. The more powerful the knowledge, the easier it is for people to ignore the downsides at the expense of fellow human beings.
That is especially true because we have an economic system that rewards short-term improvements in the efficiency of the system, regardless of the long-term costs. Fossil fuel use, cutting down local forests (has relatively litle short-term impact, but adds up).
And, as we pursue knowledge and technology more vigorously, we slowly lose other forms of gaining knowledge such as a relationship with nature.
Human society is advanced with regard to its knowledge capability, but exceptionally primitive with regard to basic wisdom about community, love, nature, and friendship. We continually donwgrade these things to make way for new technology, and the prisoner's dilemma (tech gives some people advantages, so everyone is pressured to use it), makes it hard to make decisions for the long-run like the Amish do.
I resonate with your concerns, but I believe the best way to secure a human-centric future is fully diving in to technology and our constant surveillance realities. My goal is to empower people to collect their own data to help them objectively understand the impact technology has on themselves: https://hindsight.life/
The augmentation of human beings with tech like this is a proto-type for a dismal world where wisdom is lacking and the pure pursuit of knowledge is becoming a more and more seductive path to destruction.