Even with a more judicious approach to recording though, the second problem was curation. When you get home with tens or hundreds of photos, what do you do with them? In my experience, either (a) you go through them and clear out all the bad ones almost immediately (same week at least) or (b) they sit around forever gathering dust on a drive somewhere. It's not beneficial to have thousands of photos covering every insignificant event in your life (or hundreds of hours of video). Going through all that stuff is slow, boring, and tedious. Our memories are all about culling the details that don't matter and leaving behind what's important. Our brains do this automatically for us, but who is going to do this work with a massive photo collection? Would I trust AI to do it? Probably not.
There's a golden mean here somewhere, where you have enough photos to spark a memory 20 years from now, but not so many that it becomes a chore to capture and curate them. Capturing every moment is definitely not it.
When I'm traveling I try to do this curation the same day of taking the photo. In practice it's a great time at night to go through all photos of the day and discuss any interesting ones with your partner.
Also for this reason I almost never take videos. They are too troublesome to curate. Going through photos is quick. It takes only a second to decide to whether it is worth keeping. And once you decide it is, it takes less than a minute to touch up on the curves and the colors.
I mean seriously? Was this written by an outreach intern at the NSA? I know the world is already going this direction, but holy Christ I'm going to hold out as long as I can from being constantly monitored as I do every little mundane thing through my life.
Do I WANT to remember driving to the store 6 months ago? Do I WANT to remember changing a light bulb 8 weeks ago? There's a reason our brains delete stuff: because most of it is fucking stupid. Why feed this giant malevolent machine even more just so we can have records of all the things nobody gives a flying fuck about?
That is your memory, and it is not perfect, sometimes for the better. But with today technologies, culture and economy factors involved, it will imply more players there. And maybe it won't be ever at our reach, not because technology is not advancing, but because the other factors that are getting more weight.
AMA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
The essay does not deal very much with technical aspects, like "Do I want to remember this and that banality?". In the story, those questions are already solved as an AI will manage access to the desired "flashbacks".
The essay focusses more on the question, how "remodeling" our memory over time might be an important aspect of social interaction, self perception and self development.
Yes, our memories shape our identities, the same isn’t true for our memory sticks.
ryandrake•4mo ago