Humans are bad at remembering things. We forget over time, we’re bad at paying attention in the first place, and we sometimes remember things incorrectly because of our natural biases and the way we perceive the world. A lot of things happen to us, and we don’t remember a lot of them for long.
Maybe AI can solve that. We’ll know the answer soon. Microsoft, for example, is betting big on Recall, an app that uses AI to collect, store, organize, and recall everything you’ve done or seen on your computer. (Imagine a computer asking you, “What was that article about bees I read the other day? What was the timeline in it?”) The most impressive AI demo at Google I/O this year was how it remembered where you put your glasses. Apple thinks AI might be able to create photo albums and inspiring videos to remember great moments. And companies like Notion and Dropbox are incorporating AI into their own tools to help you find and remember all your meetings and tasks. They’re all promising the same thing: you don’t have to worry about remembering because the computer will do it for you. And it’ll do it faster and better.
In this episode The Verge CastWe’re going to speak with one of the people who’s been working on this problem for a long time, Dan Siroker, CEO of Limitless, to talk about what it takes to make a good memory aid, how it could be used in the future, and why it’s so hard to get right.
We also talk about the human side: what would our lives be like if we stopped forgetting things? Is remembering your friend’s birthday actually different than an AI model would do? And are these tools really useful outside of work? Tools like Limitless are emerging and evolving quickly, and we have to think about how to live with them.
If you want to learn more about what we discussed in this episode, start with these links: