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Illustration by Carcazan

Human memory vs AI cache

LA(S)IMO: I have come to think that memory may be very close to our soul. There is this Netflix documentary where a man who lost his memory was suddenly without the ability to think about the future, or plan. He lost hope, the narrator said. AI may rely on past information, but do we call that “remembering”?

(C)ARCAZAN: Well, the thing with human remembering is that it is not just the physical or factual act of retrieving stored information retained about a part event, but that it is in fact inherent and dripping with emotional association and emotional memory as well… Think Freud’s ‘mystic writing pad’… But I tend to think that our memories actually become part of us and shape how we deal with the present, that’s why I like the haptic memory transference which occurs in stop motion animation… Sorry that was a really long reply!

S: Do you remember things while you shape your characters? Do you feel that to be more a retrieving process of buried memories or a reliving through the light of the present?

C: …

S: I mean, the shaping of characters, making them, all the touch-related actions in the making — does that bring back memories? Or reshape them?

C: I think memories shape them, and us. Not in a repetitive or unoriginal way, but it’s a selective lens through which to see the future or present, sometimes it’s even subconscious… Sometimes just a characteristic or correction of the past or feeling can occur…

S: This idea of selection and (even more) correction. Definitely beyond AI. The generation of the new is at once an echo of the existing and something original (like it or not) — but not a transformational journey. It lacks the purpose, and the sense of it. I suppose that is why I am a firm believer that Artificial General Intelligence may not be achieved.

C: Well, luckily there’s only AI in certain specific contexts to deal with… AI would only have a cache, isn’t it? I love how that’s from the French for ‘to hide’ — sounds so fragrant and yet spooky… But memories do transform your journey because they’re always imbued with emotional resonance as opposed to just cookies..

S: Specific AI is where the best performance has been achieved. Diagnostic AI is one of my favourite. In being able to identify and consistently classify many more data patterns than we (consciously or unconsciously) do, it can produce thousands of responses in the same amount of time that a human would need for a few. But here is where it gets interesting — through freeing humans of a repetitive task, it also gifts them of time to be used for more complex tasks, like research or more challenging cases that do not fit the existing knowledge. Still, the research on Artificial General Intelligence has not stopped. Not sure what you mean by saying that AI would only have a cache, though… Cookies are just crumbs left on the path to identify past visitors. It is just a very small dimension of software memory.

C: Well, that raises a lot of questions: what does identifying data entail? Is it achieved from retrieving stored data? That doesn’t need emotional resonance… Then how does producing thousands of responses actually free up your time of wading through them? Are you talking about what it can produce and present when asked or whether AI’s memory is just more vast than a human’s in an encyclopaedic way? What if I just wanted to find something that resonated with a specific memory of mine so that I am moved by it? What search term could I ever enter which could achieve that?

S: You really do not want emotional resonance in medical diagnostics… and this already has real-life applications, helping the system to reduce queues, and patients by increasing their chance of cure or survival. I certainly do not see a threat here, but a precious ally. And I think we agree on something crucial — by being great at specific tasks, it remains unfit for others. Those that need and benefit of emotions.

C: That’s why I have my example — but medical diagnostics only need factual retrieval and so that kind of memory is less what we were referring to.. initially anyway…

S: Well. Our memory (and consequently, our intelligence) reshapes facts, so it writes new truths. In some cases that is exactly what you want, and in others it is precisely the enemy of growth. But what is growth? And who defines the ethical pillars that drive the unborn AI knowledge? How about that for our next chapter? C: You’ve just opened a minefield with the reshaping truths suggestion… Usually (and depending on our memories) we try to reshape memories to fit a narrative more palatable to us.. and maybe even doing that comes from being shaped by those memories and emotional memories… Ok, I’m exhausted…