'Memorybot: AI and the battle for superintelligent memory' – Professor Andrew Hoskins

""Of late, we have reached peak doomerism on the potential of the arrival of artificial general intelligence, the triumph of superintelligence, and the end of humanity. But is all this mostly froth that obscures today’s, rather than tomorrow’s, reality of AI already remembering for us, as well as about us?

Superintelligent memory, a memory that outperforms humans on cognitive (as well as social) forms of remembrance, is not a new idea. Rather, it has been imagined in literature, art and film, and pursued by designers and technologists for decades. It is founded on a long-promised science-fiction utopia: if only the perceived fallibilities of individual and social memory – loss, denial, forgetting – could be overcome, then what awesome control this would be!

I show in this talk how the generative AI-afflicted condition I call the memorybot is here and now. This is how individuals and societies are afforded astonishingly powerful and immediate means to mine, illuminate and remake a past once dependent on both the strengths and weaknesses of human cognition. GenAI promises superintelligent vision through opening a doorway into a world of memories and data, previously undiscovered, unimagined, unseen. Yet at the same time, in regenerating former lives and through mining and sharing present ones, it hollows out the human soul, contorting the past and re-purposing memory for an array of ends.

The fundamental paradox here is in GenAI’s amazing transformation of what human memory is and what is does, at the same time as threatening its functionality and survival. The memorybot then is the battle over the memorial human, no longer silent, absent or forgotten in decay and in death, but perpetually open to new uses and abuses." - Professor Andrew Hoskins