The Persistence of Memory

I recently read a Substack post about AI companies buying up books to scan and incorporate into their models. The post brings up a few good topics for discussion, but the one that stands out to me is how people believe that books are being preserved online by things like Project Gutenberg. While some of this is true, we’ve seen huge collections of books, and therefore human knowledge, being deleted due to ebook sellers going out of business.

Honestly, it’s another form of knowledge rot. Human memory isn’t as good as it once was — you see it when you play trivia at a bar. “What was the name of that guy in that movie from a couple years ago?” We can search up so many facts on our handheld devices, so quickly, that our brains file it all into short term memory. Few things get locked away into long term memory.

I fear another wave of this with AI programming, but that’s another topic. Once everything is online and we depend on it as the source of truth, it’s really not that difficult to delete entire swaths of human memory or reshape them.