Around the time the iPhone came out 17 years ago, Charles Stross wrote an article in which he imagined a future in which all of human experience is recorded:
With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text […], and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all – like having Google for your memory.
You don’t ever need to forget a conversation again, even if all you can recall about it is that it was with a stranger you met in a given pub about two months ago and someone mentioned the word “fishhooks”.
If you’re a police officer, it means never forgetting a face and always logging all your interactions with the public.
If you’re suffering from the early stages of dementia, or if you’re simply over-worked and expected to keep track of too many tasks at the office, it means you’ve got a memory prosthesis to help you keep track of things.
And if you’re a student, it means you can concentrate on understanding your lecturer, and worry about making notes later.
[…]
For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history “really” began.
Stross was not the only one thinking about this at the time.
With large language models, this is now close to becoming a reality. I already use Microsoft’s Copilot to record, transcribe and summarize my online calls. It works well enough to be useful. Recording all we hear and see and making it searchable, giving us perfect memory, is within reach. There are devices that already that attempt this, and while they’re not quite ready yet, the moment that Stross imagined in 2007 seems imminent.
Nehaveigur 