That is: we don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred. A photograph says more about its creator than its subject. It’s tempting to seek an oracle to bust through all this postmodern bullshit, but I’m sorry to inform that truth has always been a prism and not a looking-glass. Train on what data? Clip which quote? These decisions—call them taste, discernment, subjectivity—these are the reasons we still turn to human work.
Saved by sari and
if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different
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