The Cyrano in Your Ear Conundrum

Brian (0:01)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. This Saturday, we're talking about the Cyrano in your ear conundrum. And that's Cyrano as in Cyrano de Bergerac, the famous story of the poet who is whispering all the right things to say into a guy's ear so he can win the girl, right? But what we're talking about is the idea that sort of everybody has a Cyrano in their ear.

And what I'm talking about is wearables essentially. So we already know about metaglasses. We know about other pendants that will come out and stuff. But this is a Brian take on this. But it's my personal feeling that these are going to become ubiquitous. These are going to become very, very commonplace. I don't know if it'll be glasses. I don't know if it'll be like an air pod. I don't know if it, I don't know what it'll be. It could be on your wrist even though it's able to pick up voices and things like that. My point is it's not even just about necessarily having a camera, which is what everybody thinks about today. It's really just about having a real time zero or very low latency listening device who's able to relay information back to you. That's the idea of the Cyrano in your ear. And so the conundrum is really about like, what does that mean? If if sort of everybody has access to that, are we all having augmented conversations? And if that's the case, if everybody is basically able to talk to somebody else live while also having the full power and knowledge of the world, the Internet in your ear, is that fair? Well, frankly, we know people who have this sort of, right? They have the they have the low technology side of this. Famous people or politicians might have PR people. Famously, if you ever saw the show, Veep, there's the guy whispering into Selena's ear, right? The really I can't think of his character's name, but they're really funny guy.

And so, you know, he's saying, oh, you're about to talk to Selena, and that's his mistress, not his wife, right? All these kind of funny things. OK, so like that exists. We know it does. We have we have people who assist people. But in the future, every politician you talk to is going to have sort of like the earbud or the earpiece or the glasses or the whatever, the watch, the pendant. I don't know, but it's going to be very commonplace. And they're going to be able to say, oh, yeah, of course we met. Yeah, of course I remember you. Oh, yeah, no, I know everything about your particular, you know, issue that you want to talk to me about, right? But it's like the question of the conundrum is like, there's two sides to this. So on the one side, it argues that, you know, universal access to real-time AI assistance, it fundamentally levels the social playing field because we already accept, you know, existence from glasses and hearing aids and things like that. You know, why would it be any different? Why should AI be any different from that? You know, if it helps people express their genuine thoughts or like, you know, they get nervous, so they do have that Cyrano in their ear. Then the other side argues that people deserve to know when a conversation includes an invisible third party, even though technically, you know, there's times where you probably don't already.

But a spontaneous joke or a thoughtful apology or a perfect response during an emotional conversation does carry meaning, partly because the person produced the words in the moment, right? It wasn't done by AI. I mean, this show, the newsletter, the, you know, whatever, it's all augmented, right, by AI. I have a funny idea for a joke that I want to put in the newsletter, but then I fully rely on AI to bring that to life. I did not literally create a pixel or, you know, do anything in terms of making the actual image. I just had a concept. I worked through it and tried to be as descriptive as I could. I've gone through a couple of iterations and then there it is. That's obviously not the same thing as being a successful cartoonist who's able to get the idea and also put the pen to paper, right? OK, so if everyone eventually has AI whispering in their ear, does assisted conversation simply become something that's just part of the normal humor and interaction in the future, leveling the playing field and making really the disclosure relevant because you're kind of going out into the world, assuming that everybody has it. And this brings me back to an idea I had like maybe well before AI.