[beepbooptheory]

Humbly offer this, a cautionary tale perhaps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious

https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction%20-%20Borges%2...

[drdaeman]

I’m not sure I understand the morale of the story. Would you share yours?

A crudest summary of my understanding is that it’s a tale of some dude with eidetic memory who - as a consequence of it - develops a conlang with a huge vocabulary but without abstract concepts.

It’s a stretch for sure, but all I could think of it, is that it’s possibly a tale of how a person with an eidetic memory may find the sheer volume of available information so overwhelming it may even hurt their information processing, like the formation of associative memories. Or something like that, I don’t think I know how it works.

If that, my idea of how machine-assisted memory is supposed to work is opposite of that, it should provide limited but relevant information, with a lot of classifications and references further. Like an encyclopedia with extra fancy natural language querying mechanism. It’s whole point to give awareness about anything user wants to know, faster and more comprehensively than regular diaries, but focused on just what matters for an inquiry.

Fumes, in my understanding, wouldn’t have an idea of a “key” but only “that front door key on a silver keychain” or “smaller mailbox key with a deep scratch on the right side”. If I’d be querying external memory through a natural language interface, it’d be doing opposite of that, heavily relying on abstract ideas as classifiers. Machine that cannot connect “mail”, “key” and “location” into a meaningful query would be useless. Computer “AI” assistant is not an eidetic memory (at least until we start to consider BMI), it’s only a personal encyclopedia at one’s fingertips.