Would total recall be a curse or a boon? I ask because a recent book “Total Recall: How the eMemory revolution will change everything” started me thinking.

100% memory, in the form of digital files and images, perhaps enhanced by newer as-yet-undiscovered sensors, will be with us soon. This is a given part of the techno-revolution we are living through.

The book has a glowing introduction by Bill Gates and it all seems to take the point of view this is a good thing. But is it?

Even if we wished to, we may not be able to forget. Because you get the stuff beaten out of you at school for forgetting doesn’t mean all forgetting is bad! We have to filter some of our impressions, otherwise we would go into overload.

In fact, as I have written elsewhere, we have to selectively (and wisely) UN-remember certain things just to function at all. We have naturally in-built mechanisms to do this for us. Who can foresee what will happen if we forecefully override these mechanisms?

Anyway, who cares about out past, except us? Isn’t it just vanity; to believe that our little lives, of all those in history, are the ones that really matter? That we should be preserved, when greats such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Buddha and Beethoven have no “substance” of their selves and lives left behind?

Why would our kids and grandkids want to know all our stuff? They should be getting on with their own lives and living fully in the stream of progress of the human condition.

By chance, another review from the same writer looked at the opposite book. It’s title is “Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age”. Continue reading →