Logic and common sense are different, in kind of… weirdly amusing ways sometimes.

There are some things that are perfectly good common sense, and also… logically kind of ridiculous.

For example:

There are places where you are not allowed to take photographs, and places where you are not allowed to make audio or video recordings.

In many of the same places, you, as a human being, are allowed to be present, to look and listen, and to tell people afterwards about what you saw and heard.

And the only reason your memory is more acceptable than the memory in a camera or recording device, is because your memory is…. deemed to be less reliable.

In other words: The reason people are more afraid of being recorded by machines than being remembered by a person, is because the machines make recordings that are more likely to get believed.

Not even because they’re more likely to be accurate! Humans can be accurate, and machines can be wrong! If you had a damaging secret– or even just an intellectual-property type of secret– you wouldn’t want it witnessed by either machines or people, because either one could faithfully transmit the facts you don’t want revealed. And even if you didn’t have anything to hide that could hurt you by being revealed accurately, you might still fear both human and machine testimony against you– because the way a video is framed, or the selection of sounds that an audio recorder catches, can give as misleading an account as a dishonest human witness.

But, because the material that’s captured by a machine tends to be stored in more precise detail than you can expect from human memory– and because it’s hard to alter it convincingly into outright falsehood– and because it is just such a well-known fact that humans are very capable of both remembering things wrong and deliberately twisting the truth–

–most people will believe a machine recording more readily than they’ll believe the account of a human witness.

And that’s why machine recordings tend to be more feared– by both the guilty and the innocent.

So, that’s one of society’s weird twists of logic. If humans could be more reliably trusted not to tell lies and not to be wrong– then, quite likely, we’d be punished for that greater trustworthiness by being trusted less.

Go figure.