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What Will Happen When Robots Store All Our Memories
In the future, we could record, optimize, and replay our memories — even after death
In an excerpt from his new book Talking to Robots, David Ewing Duncan imagines looking back from a future where memories can be permanently stored with the help of a technology called Memory Bot based on an actual conversation he had with Ken Goldberg, Tiffany Shlain, and Odessa Shlain Goldberg.
Yes, there really was a time when people were expected to preserve memories on their own. A time when you would share with your four-year-old daughter a stunning sunset and it wouldn’t be automatically recorded as a neural-meme. You felt so very close to your little one and she to you, only to have that moment vanish forever. Maybe you took a selfie, but that never really captured the whole experience.
Then came Memory Bot, with its revolutionary Quantum Meme Vector® technology. Created in the future by a husband and wife and their daughter — UC Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg, the filmmaker-raconteur Tiffany Shlain, and the future entrepreneur and philosopher Odessa Shlain Goldberg, respectively — Memory Bot was for years the most popular gift ever during the holiday shopping season, even more popular than Teddy Bots. Memory Bot remembered everything that you wanted it to: sunsets with your daughter, your grandson’s bar mitzvah, the birth of your puppy, your promotion at work (before you were replaced by a robot), and on and on.
It all began in a free-ranging conversation in the Shlain Goldberg living room in Marin County, California, way back in 2018. That’s when Ken, Tiffany, and Odessa, who was then14 years old, were sitting quietly late one afternoon chatting about robots, technology, and memory. Ken Goldberg was the first in the family to mention the idea of a memory bot for older people to remember their lives, though the concept soon expanded to a mem bot for everyone. “In some sense, it will be something that is completely focused on gathering your most important memories, those you want to remember, and to have access to, with all the experiences and connections you had throughout life.”
“I think a version of this is actually doable now,” he added, speaking as a Berkeley robotics professor who…
