Reported by The Verge AI
Filtering conversations and memories through AI is a reality-bending lesson in why intelligence can’t replace wisdom.
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I get asked this a lot in therapy. Plenty of life events, big and small, have triggered this question. Three weeks ago, it was the fact that I had to ask my therapist for her consent because I was wearing the Amazon Bee Frontier during our session.
That first week, I didn’t really have an answer. A lot had changed since I first tested Bee , an always-recording AI wearable, early last year. The elevator pitch is that it listens to all your conversations and uses AI to transcribe and summarize them. From there, it has a List feature that suggests to-dos, a Grow feature for identifying areas where you can improve, and various summaries that analyze the content, tone, and takeaways from your conversations. It’s even got a chatbot that can answer questions about yourself or what was said and when.
In the last 19 months, it’s gotten better at distinguishing my actual speech from TV dialogue. It can now pull in information from my calendar and photos app, and suggest things to buy on Amazon based on what I’ve said. At times, particularly for job-related tasks, it’s helped me remember talking points. But most of the time, it’s led to me questioning my reality.
My therapist usually lets me arrive at my own decisions, even if I often take the scenic route to the obvious conclusion. After 11 years, she’s intimately acquainted with the wackier parts of my job. But in my third week of talking about Bee, my therapist requested that I chuck this thing right out a window.
It’s a bit dark, but a big reason I’m in therapy is to build trust in my own memories.…