A few months ago I did a trial of the Limitless AI Pendant wearable/listening device.

It’s a wearable that listens to you, your conversations, and interactions as you go about your day.

Every morning it then it provides a kind of summary of your previous day. You know — the main themes, topics, action items or whatever based on some AI-based algorithmic ingestion of all the things it has heard.

It’s a bit like the listening personal assistants that people have join them on Zoom calls and the like. (I guess?)

So I’m trying this thing and I’m pondering these morning summaries the thing is giving me. And I’m really sensing that the algorithm is ‘tuned’ for a particular sort of person who wants a tight organization on their day and behaviors.

It’s tuned for structure and performance or something like that.

(Is this Limitless like the Bradley Cooper film?)

There was this one day’s summary in which I had this couple hours long brainstorm/ideation session. Limitless is telling me that it might benefit me to be more organized in discussions and not wander too much as to the topic.

Um. So — no.

That’s completely wrong.

In that context, the purpose was specifically to wander and find our way through an open-ended discussion where we did not know where we were going. And we were happy for that wandering around an unfamiliar terrain — a terrain for which there were lots of possible paths.

In another instance, I had inadvertently left the Limitless AI device on, and it was sitting near the living room where I was watching the screwball comedy Step Brothers because my nephews were all, like..“Unc. You gotta watch Step Brothers..I can’t believe you haven’t seen Step ”

So I watched it.

And the next morning the Limitless AI device’s little daily summary was berating me for talking so aggressively towards my parents, and it congratulated me on a successful event at the Catalina Wine Mixer.

“Congratulations on your success with the Catalina Wine Mixer.”

And of course, me being me — I started imagining all of the ways that these kinds of agentic doo-dads are going to make a mess of people’s lives. Lots of Design Fiction possibilities there for the next issue of ‘Tomorrow’s News Today’, yeah? What kind of hijinks would such a thing get into rummaging around in your emails or its ‘seamless integration’ with your local home security bureau when it overhears you watching John Wick.

P.S. If you haven’t seen Step Brothers, my nephews think you could do a lot worse for a screwball comedy. And that Catalina Wine Mixer? It’s become a real thing. Fiction found its way into our reality, as per normal.