Daniel Wentsch

We can build LLM systems that don’t just remember us, but help us evolve. Systems that challenge us to break patterns, to imagine differently, to change. Not to preserve who we were, but to make space for who we might yet become, just as our ancestors did.

Not with perfect memory, but with the courage to forget.

Of course, not all AI systems need to forget. In high-stakes domains — medicine, law, scientific research — perfect recall can be life-saving. However, this essay is about a different kind of AI: the kind we bring into our daily lives. The ones we turn to for brainstorming, emotional support, writing help, or even casual companionship. These are

Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation. Yet, infinite-memory LLM systems, much like personalization algorithms, are engineered explicitly for comfort. They wrap users in a cocoon of sameness by continuously repeating familiar

When memory becomes fixed, identity becomes recursive. As we saw with our friend Mary, infinite memory doesn’t just remember our past; it nudges us to repeat it. And while the reinforcement may feel benign, personalized, or even comforting, the history of filter bubbles and echo chambers suggests that this kind of pattern replication rarely leaves

Where nature embraced forgetting as a survival strategy, we now engineer machines that retain everything: your past prompts, preferences, corrections, and confessions.

What sounds like a convenience, digital companions that “know you,” can quietly become a constraint. Unlike human memory, which fades and adapts, infinite memory stores information

Selective forgetting helps us prioritize the relevant, discard the outdated, and stay flexible in changing environments. It prevents us from becoming trapped by obsolete patterns or overwhelmed by noise.

And it’s not passive decay. Neuroscience shows that forgetting is an active process: the brain regulates what to retrieve and what to suppress,

“Infinite memory” runs against the very grain of what it means to be human. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology tell us that forgetting isn’t a design flaw, but a survival advantage. Our brains are not built to store everything. They’re built to let go: to blur the past, to misremember just enough to move forward.

Our brains don’t archive