Three months ago, you told your assistant you hated broccoli. Yesterday, while suggesting meal ideas, it remembered. Handy.
Six months ago, on a tired evening, you confided that you were thinking of leaving your job. Since then, you've changed your mind. It remembers that too.
Assistants that remember us are becoming the norm. Most of the big services already offer memory, and companies in the sector are betting on personal assistants that would accompany you everywhere, all the time. The question deserves to be asked before we get used to it: do we really want to be known that well?
What memory brings
We should start there, because it's real. An assistant that remembers saves you from repeating everything. It knows your job, your tastes, your constraints. Its answers are more accurate, because they start from you.
It's what we expect from a good family doctor or a good bookseller: someone who doesn't need everything explained to them again at every visit.
What forgetting does for us
But in humans, forgetting isn't a breakdown. It has a function.
We forget the details and keep the essentials. We forget the clumsy sentence a friend said ten years ago, and that's why the friendship continues. We forget who we were at sixteen, and that's what lets us become someone else.
A perfect memory doesn't make better people. It makes people who can't move on.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined, in 1942, a young man called Funes who, after a fall from a horse, begins to remember absolutely everything: every leaf of every tree, every shape of every cloud, at every moment he saw them. He should be a genius. He is incapable of it. To think, Borges explains in substance, you have to forget differences, generalise, let go of the detail. Funes, who forgets nothing, can no longer think at all.
The imbalance
There's a sizeable difference between a friend who remembers you and a machine that does.
You change. Your tastes, your plans, your opinions shift. An assistant, though, keeps a record of who you were at the moment you spoke to it. If nothing comes along to correct that memory, it will carry on addressing a version of you that no longer exists.
And above all, that memory doesn't really belong to you. It's kept by a company, on servers. A few weeks ago we were asking whether you could entrust your own memory to a machine. The question flips: what does the machine do with the memory it has of us?
The right to be forgotten
In Europe, the law has already settled part of the question: you have the right to request the erasure of your personal data. This is what's known as the right to be forgotten.
In practice, most assistants let you see what they've retained, delete a memory, or switch memory off entirely. We explain how in our practical guide.
What we take away
The question isn't whether to reject machine memory. It provides real benefits, and it would be absurd to go without.
It's about remembering that a good memory isn't one that retains everything. It's one that keeps what matters, and lets the rest go. A machine can't do that sorting for you. So it's up to you to decide what you entrust to it, and what you ask it to forget.