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
From the perspective of scientific visualization, the idea that machines allow us to see true has long been outmoded. In everyday discourse, however, there is a continuing tendency to characterize the objective as that which speaks for itself without the interference of human perception, interpretation, judgment, and so on.
Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason,
... See moreBut, I wondered, 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.