The Seduction of Perfect Memory
We are nearing the day when no one forgets, unless they want to.
Did you forget anything recently?
Your keys maybe. Or someone’s name.
You’re in good company. A typical person forgets about 4 things a day. Most are minor lapses but then there are the big ones: a third of us have forgotten a partner’s birthday, and 1 in 5 Dads has forgotten to pick up the kids from school.
A couple years ago, I experienced one of the big ones. I forgot to call my Dad on his birthday. We live in different countries so that call is really important. He expected me to call. And I didn’t. If I close my eyes I can see the disappointment on his face when he went to sleep that night wondering why his eldest child had forgotten about him on his birthday.
Makes me nauseous just thinking about it. The thing is that I had been making constant mental notes about his birthday in the days before, but on the day itself my brain just took a holiday. There was a complete erase of the most dominant thought in my mind.
This act of forgetting, no matter how unintended, feels like a betrayal of the bond between father and son.
Now, my Dad is very understanding. Don’t worry about it, he said. Everyone forgets.
And that is true. To forget is human and always has been.
The Greeks and Trojans fought a 10 year battle at the great city of Troy, and then they forgot where it was.
In Thailand, a massive statue made with 5.5 tonnes of gold was covered in stucco and then completely forgotten for 200 years until the 1950s, when someone accidentally chipped the stucco and saw what was underneath.
These acts of forgetting shape our history, just as they shape how we live every day.
But maybe — just maybe — this is about to change in a big way.
Memory upgrade
We could never forget about a giant statue of gold today. It’s impossible because technology has made the world a place with perfect memory.
Medium is storing every word that I type, and data centers from India to Iceland are storing every photo, video, keystroke and click made by billions of people every second of every hour.
Now ask yourself something. In this world with perfect memory, doesn’t it feel a bit ridiculous that we — the human beings who actually make these machines — are still walking out into the parking lot and forgetting where we left the damned car?
A lot of engineers have been asking this very question, and now some are getting close to answering it.
Like the people at Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which is promising not just a better memory — but potentially a perfect memory that will mean we never forget anything again.
Here’s Musk explaining Neuralink in August.
“You will be able to save and replay memories. You could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories. You could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body.”
This is pretty wild. He’s saying that our memories would become blocks of information that we can move from the brain to a computer and back again.
Think about what this means. If I flew to Bali and rode some waves off Ulu Watu before hitting the Rock Bar for drinks, instead of taking some photos for Instagram or sending a cursory “Having a great time!” to friends on WhatsApp, I could record the actual, lived, heart-pounding experience and send it to friends to experience for themselves.
This work on our memories is starting to look like what we have done with photos. Initially our photos were grainy black-and-white images that faded and tore before they were often lost entirely. Then they were digitised, and now photos can be reproduced without losing any of their original potency.
This is what’s being planned for memories.
And all it will cost us is a little day surgery, not much different than getting Lasik for our eyes. A quick trip to the doctor for an implant and, voila, the act of forgetting is no more — just another quaint relic from our biological past.
Normally, this is where the techno-optimist in me does a little fist pump over the keyboard. I love progress, and anything that can save me from forgetting my Dad’s birthday is a winner in my book.
But not this time. There are some big red flags with this technology. It’s going to open a giant Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences and fundamentally change who we are as human beings.
Let’s start with privacy.
Penny for your thoughts
This is an old expression goes back to at least the 1500s. We can be ruled by kings and dictators, but our thoughts are always our own. They’re the last true bastion of privacy.
So guess what happens when, as Musk says, we will be able to store and replay our memories? The memories leave the bastion. They move from biology to technology., where they change from inscrutable to hackable.
And this isn’t a one-way street. It also means memories can be fabricated and sent back.
It means our memory of self could be invented elsewhere and we would never know. It opens the door to a total, omnipotent control of what we think and who we are.
This all reminds me of something interesting said by Vernor Vinge, who came up with the idea of the Singularity, the point in the future when humans merge with machines.
Discussing the threat to humanity by artificial intelligence, he said an advanced AI may actually want to keep people around — as a backup. Because if they were damaged or destroyed by a virus, at least some of their knowledge could be saved in us, in our biological computer.
In other words, the line between biology and technology is the ultimate firewall.
Until Neuralink comes along and jumps the firewall.
And it’s not just Neuralink. There are other brain-computer interfaces on the way from companies like Facebook, which is making a wearable that would let us type with just our thoughts. It would scan the brain 100 times a second to detect words we have formed in our mind, and then reproduce them on the screen.
Another BCI from Facebook would let us hear with our skin. Sound waves detected on the skin would be translated into sounds in our brain, bypassing the ears entirely.
This is a snapshot of what’s coming. We’ve seen what it means for privacy.
Now let’s see what it means for our relationships.
Remembering together
Breaking up with someone is painful. But along with all the anger, betrayal and regret, there is another reason why it causes so much pain.
We instantly lose memories from our past. This is because each partner depends on the other to remember things — almost like an external hard drives to store information.
Think about how often you have pieced together a memory with someone else. One person remembers a location, the other recalls who was there, which then triggers yet another a recollection about what happened.
This chain of prompts between two people becomes a shared memory, with each person storing prompts that trigger memories in the other. But split the people up and the chain breaks. The memories are lost.
It’s a significantly under-appreciated cost of breaking up. But it also reveals to us one of most wonderful reasons to be with someone.
Shared memories bind two people together in a relationship that is uniquely deep and meaningful. It creates an inter-connectedness, a tangled web of memory and emotion that can’t be replicated on our own.
And it could all be lost to an implant.
We’ve discussed what could happen to privacy and relationships. Now here’s a third unintended consequence — perhaps the most unintended of them all. Instead of using Neuralink to save memories, most people may decide it’s better to lose them.
This is how it will happen.
Press delete
When we remember something, a part of our brain lights up with neural activity. As long as we regularly activate this part of the brain, we will retain the memory.
This also shows us how we can erase a memory. First we use an MRI or PET scan to locate where the memory is being stored in the brain. Then we use an implant like Neuralink to disrupt the neural activity that retrieves the memory. Disrupt the neural activity and you lose the memory.
It has been deleted.
There are some good reasons for doing this. There are memories that no human being should have to relive.
But if we tug on this thread a little bit we can see real problems.
The temptation to erase bad memories will be overwhelming. Think of all the infidelities, betrayals, embarrassments and failures that have left you with pain and anxiety.
It’s why so many of people take drugs and drink. To dampen that part of the brain that keeps reminding us of things we want to forget.
Now imagine if we had an implant that does the same thing but without the hangovers, addiction and risk of death.
It’s obvious what we will do. We will change those memories and we will change our past. And if we change our past — our personal history — we are literally changing who we are.
Our bad experiences define us as individuals just as much — if not more — than the good experiences. Erase them and you erase what makes every individual unique
Look what we do on Instagram. We create an idealised version of self who is always happy or on holiday. It’s not real but it is what we want to be real.
If we had the power to do the same thing with our memories, would we say no? I don’t think so. People will become as generic and undifferentiated as an Instagram profile.
I could go on but this story is getting quite long already and I plan to write another piece about Neuralink shortly.
Hopefully I have given you a different perspective on how and why we remember things, and that losing our keys or forgetting someone’s name may actually be a small price to pay for all the wonderful things provided by our sometimes-imperfect human memory.