Imagine a device that remembers all your conversations. Really. All of them. Turn off your concerns and join the Limitless mindset!! ![[Pasted image 20250705124353.png]] I’ve been trying the Limitless pendant, a $120 AI transcriber that launched in 2025 (iPhone only for now). [I love exploring new AI tools](Tools%20I%20use%20and%20love.md), so I was one of the first to pre-order it. You get 20 hours of free transcription each month, then $30 for unlimited use. The device is light, lasts all day, and clips onto my shirt or hangs as a pendant. Does this sound like the premise of a Black Mirror episode? Let's dive in. The promise of Limitless is capture my entire day’s conversations into a searchable “lifelog.” I can ask the AI what I did or learned. It's actually fascinating and scary how much context is embedded in our conversations, even without knowing where I am or who I’m with. You can use the Limitless pendant for monologues too. I went for a walk in the park, pretended to chat with a friend on the phone, but really just talked out loud to have the Limitless device transcribe everything. Using Limitless to "think out loud" and have AI make sense of it all for me. It's a weird world. ![[IMG_5856.jpg]] Limitless goes further and provides an API to access all your conversations from other apps. Via a custom MCP server, I connected my Limitless data to my to-do list, Gmail, and calendar. It’s nerdy, but it makes me feel powerful. Jarvis style. I can go through the day, say "oh I need to remember to buy bananas" and have it pop up in my calendar at the right time. There's no problem in that, right? Who is this pendant great for? If your work involves constant meetings, with action points after these meetings, this is a really useful tool. You'll synthesize your conversations, ask questions about specific ideas, and share the good bits with others. But what about personal life, like the Limitless ads? What do you do with all this data? What's the point? This is the Fitbit effect, like other devices that create an abundance of data you never really check. The reason why people track everything is to feel control over their lives. It's the feeling that matters, not the data points themselves. Apple knows this very well with its Apple Watch. For personal use, only great digital hygiene and mindful intentions can create interesting insights. Wearing this device in public is a social experiment. Basically every conversation ends up being about the pendant. In these last few days, most people reacted with discomfort, suspicion, and anger too. In business, asking “is it OK if I record?” is normal, but in personal life, it’s exhausting to explain every time. ![[Pasted image 20250705005945.png]] Limitless' homepage. During onboarding, the Limitless app does remind users to ask for recording consent. Recording conversations without other's consent, in public or private settings, is punishable by law. In France, it's a 45,000€ fine and a year in prison. The "remember all your life" doesn't seem possible after all? So in the first day of using the pendant, I saw three important limits to Limitless: 1. Subscription changes: A product you pay once, then realize you're stuck with a subscription, is annoying. This was not clear when I pre-ordered the pendant that I would then need to pay for a subscription. Their website is now more clear about this, but the prices can increase. 2. On-by-default: A product whose promise is to remember your whole life for you, but to legally do so you'd have to engage in socially-difficult conversations to get everyone's consent. That doesn't work 3. Privacy: A product that processes sensitive and confidential data on servers instead of locally on your phone, is an important privacy concern. I want to be careful about the technology I let into my life. I want technology that helps me be more present, think deeply, and love others more. AI transcribers claim to encourage presence, liberating me from note-taking so I can engage more deeply in meetings. But now that I have experience with the product, is it really the case? - Relying on it to remember details makes it easier to zone out during conversations, knowing I can revisit everything later. The allure that I can relive moments twice, because they have been recorded, is a pretext for not fully engaging in the present moment. I can just "consume" my experiences later. This convenience nudges me toward mind-wandering, not presence. - More devices create more cognitive load that take me out of the present moment. "I have to remember to charge my pendant". The distress you feel when your phone is out of battery, multiplied by all devices you rely on for your work. - Daily reflection prompts can encourage mindfulness, but when delivered via chatbot, they feel disconnecting. Personalizing Limitless to prompt me to recall key points or summarize learnings is cool in theory, but in practice I forget to do it. - Presence of the pendant, becoming the focus of the attention, becomes a distraction to the conversation. This is exacerbated with privacy and consent anxiety. Does this change in a world where we all wear AI transcribers? - We behave differently when we know we’re being recorded. We're concerned about surveillance states. But isn't surveillance capitalism 10x more insidious? Remembering one's life requires just a tiny bit of efforts, the pendant removes that effort. And products that remove efforts win. So I worry this product category is inevitable, pushing us further toward a WALL-E-like world. If this is the case, in a few years, devices like this will be popping up just like Airpods. Big tech companies will jump into it. For instance, OpenAI's upcoming i/o team will learn from this first wave of AI products like Limitless. They will instead use local AI models, with a different promise than "all your life to remember", and have a pay once offer. Or so I wish. This little device brings big questions. It also brought me renewed convictions. First, that I want to keep on exploring the limits of these AI tools, and test the alluring promises they bring. Second, that we undeniably need to create an open-source, work-first alternative device with on-device AI, designed for mindfulness and thoughtfulness. Third, that I can't wait to do more research about AI for Intelligence Augmentation (AI for IA). Individually and collectively, we can influence bigger organizations to design for intelligence augmentation. We need to fight against the temptation of the easy and pleasant, to bring the best out of us, not the lazy parts.