Forgetful machines

Reading Anne Galloway’s post about a forgetting machine got me thinking about how we view computer memory. No doubt about it, the stuff’s getting cheeper every day, and we’re rapidly approaching a paradigm where we won’t have to worry about storage space. Instead all information will be digitized and available at our fingertips.

But is that what we really want?

Machines capable of storing and retrieving all the information in the world will also be capable of bombarding us with it. Augmenting our thought process, they’ll draw connections we can’t make.