she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.
Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!
Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.
Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?
i see no way to come up with this inane horseshit other than assuming that thousands of artificial wombs will be shipped in container next tuesday
Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?
Almost sociopathic enough to get hired by Nestle.
Selected quotes:
Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm. You’ll realize that images of yourself are a kind of social currency. An unobtrusive bracelet or smart watch tracks your performance. Kids often tell him AI-enabled technologies are … creepy. It tells you when you’re near In-N-Out. Later on you realize that you were the only real human in that entire room. Everybody else was AI. You might be able to rent out each of your fingernails as an ad for social media. The home will finally be what Le Corbusier imagined: a machine for living in. What is the plan for tomorrow? They know ahead of time, even before you do, that you’re thirsty. Perhaps it’s better to let the toilet or the mirror do the tracking continuously. Faraway loved ones can visit by digital double.
But by now, maybe the agent is no longer your friend.
Maybe, at last, it is you.
If you have a digital twin, we hope it’s not a deepfake.
No thanks.
Futurism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.
Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Baby’s life. “Genocide” isn’t mentioned once, or “fascism”, or “borders”. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of “ecosystem” is in the expression “Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems”. The only mention of “climate change” is to say that it will lead us to a “reconfigurable architectural robotic space”. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesn’t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditions—considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: “What does the future hold for those born today?”
Found on metafilter, along with this excellent comment:
Learning will be increasingly self-directed, says Liz Gerber, co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Northwestern University. The future classroom is “going to be hyper-personalized.” AI tutors could help with one-on-one instruction or repetitive sports drills.
No it won’t. Learning has been going to be “increasingly self-directed” since before I was born, but it turns out, in fact, that you need to have a certain amount of maturity and focus before “self-directed” means anything more than “goofing off as much as possible” or possibly, just possibly, “intense focus only on those things that interest me intensely”. What will happen is that the children of the poor and the less-involved middle class will have shitty digital “tutors” in chaotic classrooms or goof off in isolation while the children of the rich are taught the old-fashioned way, by talented individual humans with only such technology as supports focused, human-centered learning. “Learning will be increasingly self-directed” will be used as a justification for treating everyone but the rich badly.
Furthermore, if people do have digital spy tutors looking over their shoulders, they will either be janky and kids will devote a lot of time to fooling them or they’ll be creepy surveillance that will fuck the kids up, or probably both. At best, these will be simulations of people and kids will learn to have “relationships” with fake people that don’t exist, don’t think or judge and do not love them, and IT optimists will somehow spin this as great and helpful. (I suppose there is some possibility that we will create and enslave actual conscious AI, which will be a nightmare in its own way).
That is an excellent comment. The entire LLM industry is just, “how can we delete people’s jobs even if the results are shittier?” And “how can we make people okay with this,” to which the answer (for education) is describing it as “hyper-personalized.”
I seriously wonder, do any of the folks with the “AR glasses to assist repair” thing ever actually repair anything, or do they get their ideas of how you repair stuff from computer games?
Isn’t that one of the enterprise cases where it’s actually been used?
Having schematics directly overlayed onto something I’m working on seems pretty helpful to me.
I’m not sure it’s actually being used, beyond C suite wanting something cool to happen and pretending it did happen.
have you ever done any kind of fine-detail repair on anything? electronics, something with tiny screws, fixing paint on a decal… anything like that?
minority report floating holograms sure might be useful for this, “random-ass non specialised hardware shoved on your face” is decidedly more of a diceroll
I think he means repairs like washing machines, cars etc. It’s all very well looking up videos or pics of how to repair stuff, but often the video isn’t clear or fine quality enough
An overlaid graphic on whatever you were repairing would be fucking amazing for some of the stuff I do
yeah, tell me again how you’re going to be fucking around the inside of a washing machine with a goddamn apple vision pro strapped to your face
@froztbyte @Mr_Blott new Pornhub category just dropped
but often the video isn’t clear or fine quality enough
Wouldn’t it be great if 100x the effort that didn’t go into making the video clear or fine quality enough, instead didn’t go into making relevant flying, see-through overlay decals?
Ultimately the reason it looks cool is that you’re comparing a situation of little effort being put into repair related documentation, to some movie scenario where 20 person-hours were spent making a 20-second repair fragment whereby 1 step of a repair is done.
I repair anything I can and I think the AR assistance sounds awesome. Especially when its for something I’ve never tackled before… In fact for me personally, it sounds like its by far the best use case of AR
getting normal manuals detailed enough to be useful is hard enough, forget about manuals compatible with AR set of the month
Exactly. It goes something like "remember when you were fixing a washing machine and you didn’t know what some part was and there was no good guide for fixing it, no schematic, no nothing? Wouldn’t it be awesome if 100x of the work that wasn’t put into making documentation was not put into making VR overlays?
Even assuming the manual is available, a video game HUD overlay will still only be of limited use when the thing I’m trying to fix is put together with biblically accurate tamper resistant screws that strip even if you manage to find the correct driver bit, plastic tabs you can spudge open exactly once before they snap off, unmeltable adhesives known to cause california in the state of Cancer, ribbon cables as thick as spider webs, firmware last updated two olympiads ago and whose latest version is bigger than the device’s storage could ever fit anyway, a bootloader more tightly secured than any other software on the whole device, and components from a parallel universe made by companies that have never existed.
Also it will turn out that the AR repair manual is actually for a slightly different revision than you have and somehow everyone else on the internet has the more common variant.
on paper it sounds great (as I’ve already alluded to in a previous comment). as always, the devil is in the details. and I’d bet cold hard money on this being oversold/overhyped bullshit, once again
The future as predicted by people who are completely addicted to computers.
Yes officer this smart device idea right here:
If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.
disrupting raising humans with bionic parenting
Somehow bionic nipples weren’t on my futurism bingo card.
it’s in the expansion pack dlc. gotta keep your horrors updated
