Past writings, diaries, letters, course notes, publications and blog posts reveal what I was thinking 10 to 20 years ago and beyond—or do they? To read them now is to be reminded how much any authored text is steeped in the artifices of language, culture, and circumstance. There is no direct access to an original…More
Tag Archives: memory
How to co-create with your AI
People often remember better, or differently, when in the company of others. A reading of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and science writer Israel Rosenfield (1939-) supports the collaborative aspects of remembering, recalling, interpreting and, in terms often used in logic and language studies — generalising. Conversation provides the primary demonstration of this capacity to recall…More
Neural networks that recall
It looks as though LLM technology can enhance web search without conceptually overhauling the web search methodology. (See previous post: AI versus web search.) But is there a way that neural network retrieval methodologies can be used as a substitute for explicit indexing? After all, the human capacity to recall does not rely on indexing.…More
More on automated recollection
Conversational AI platforms such as ChatGPT generate predictions for what should come next after a user inputs a question, statement, paragraph, or other text prompt. In early text prediction software, a simplistic language model might calculate the most likely word to follow a given input like “door,” based on pre-calculated statistical analysis of word co-occurrences…More
Why a neural network forgets
Conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, has limited capacity to recall the content of earlier conversations. OpenAI does not disclose all the details of its operations, but scholars estimate that ChatGPT4 can process and recall up to 10,000 words in a single session or thread. That’s a substantial improvement on earlier models, but it doesn’t ensure…More
Losing it
Location technologies and smartphones help you find your way. But for some of the time, some of us don’t only want to find our way — but lose it. Loss goes with forgetting, regret, and grief as in the art work Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper — a single red ceramic poppy in the…More
Oblivion
Pope Benedict made a dramatic helicopter exit from the Vatican this week. Dario Morelli in the Huffington Post said, “A precise, wise and great director orchestrated the video of Benedict XVI’s flight toward oblivion.” Of course Benedict will return to the Vatican, God willing, but as emeritus. Considering the authority residing in the figure of the Pope, it’s strange…More
Amnesiac machines
Digital devices help me to forget in several ways. If I store my bank details in my electronic note pad then I don’t need to commit them to memory. So I can forget such details. Thanks to the immediacy of web acces and tools such as Wikipedia I can forget the capital of The Isle…More
Portable memories
We used to store our memories in paper diaries, and boxes and albums of photographs. Now we can store them on line, and contribute to a bigger pool of social memories. We can see other people’s memories, and add our own. You can also attach memories to objects via barcodes, QR codes and RFID tags.…More