Magic Editor — Memory Changer
Our nostalgia bias is about to get worse… or enhanced?
Google announced at I/O new features in “Magic Editor” that will adjust framing and subject placement in photos so that things appear much better.
Every now and then, I cycle through my Google Photos to recall memories. Sometimes, I’ll pick a particular date over the past ten years and recall the things I was doing and feeling that day. In a few years, I’m going to do the same and voila, my past is going to seem that much brighter and exciting.
We often think about the psychological effect of new technologies will have on our children, but about us? We’re in uncharted territories for our own psychologies in how a modified evidence of our past will effect our outlook on the present and future.
Maybe we’ll be looking over the past 15 years and because of better photography editing we’ll say… “hey, things are getting better”. Or we’ll see highly edited photos (unbeknownst to us) and think things were always better in the past and couldn’t be better going forward.
We won’t know if it’s good or bad until we’ve lived through it.
