What are context, culture, emotion? If you want to talk about how people do things in a mechanical sense, starting from before “thought”, no, we have no idea how it happens. You can form a model of how you think someone thinks, but the reality is you have no idea how another’s brain functions, and thing like aphantasia, autism spectrum disorders and internal monologue prove this. Different people can have very different brains.

> ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.

You just seemlessly transitioned from a machine learning model to literal recording. These aren’t at all the same. In the context of your example, the person on the bench could have easily been wearing a body cam or recording with their cell phone, in certainly something they are capable of doing, so why would I treat it any different? The camera you mentioned could also be a CCTV feed with no DVR, in which case it couldn’t reproduce anything. The AI/person would be what would allow instant pattern recollection, like, “the person usually leaves in a hurry, but not on the weekends with a few exceptions” or “they usually turn lights on around X in the morning, and Y minutes after sunset”

> norms that restrict behavior for other reasons

What’s a concrete example of a tool that has been banned for other reasons. ML models like SD are tools, we usually let people use tools freely unless they can cause great bodily harm, and often even if they can.