Imagine an article in which everything is underlined. Or a fat book, highlighted from first page to last, in fluorescent yellow. Needless to say, you wouldn't be able to read a thing. In fact, you wouldn't even be able to focus.
I see life logging, which is the increasingly popular habit of recording every moment of a person's life, in much the same way. Ever since technology became portable, we've been intrigued by the idea that we can forever hold every experience we have had in some vault, like precious jewels. Technology has been more than happy to meet us halfway. If it hadn't been for the constraints of storage space and battery life, we would probably have had full-time capsules of our memories by now.
Always-on recording
Today, those physical limits are dissolving. While limitless recording of our routine lives isn’t fully seamless yet, the devices we use every day are eagerly stepping in to take up the job, topped with a layer of AI to put that data to use.
Your smartphone already logs your conscious micro-moments, turning your attention span into a quantifiable dataset via screen-time dashboards and passive GPS location timelines. Automated meeting transcribers, continuous voice-to-text journals, smartwatches, and rings capture verbal details and biological data.
Now, AI-powered smart glasses are taking personal recording to a new level. With Meta’s new smart glasses, you can literally say, "Hey Meta, remember this," and the glasses will snap a photo, collect context, and store it for you to query later. You can ask where you parked, what your departure gate number was, or what the name of a person you just met was.
It sounds extremely useful. After all, what’s the harm in technology remembering where you put your keys or tracking your grocery list? We've made to-do lists as long as we can remember.
Imperfect memory
The problem is that human memory was never designed by nature like a hard disk. Memories fade, distort, fuse with fantasies, or lose detail. That is how we evolved. Human relationships, nostalgia, and even forgiveness depend entirely on imperfect memory. So do traumas, disappointments, and emotional healing. AI glasses threaten to turn memory from something biological into something searchable.
Humans are not designed to remember absolutely everything at an equal level of intensity. By treating a screenshot of a Wi-Fi password, a morning step-count, and a major life milestone with the exact same mechanical fidelity, the machine flattens the natural emotional hierarchy of our lives.
We’ve already tasted this platform-driven distortion. Facebook and Google Photos constantly throw up arbitrary notifications urging us to celebrate a random, uninspired photo from five years ago.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if it threw up a photo of someone urging a celebration, and the person turns out to be an ex from a bitter breakup. Most unpleasant. Life-logging will give AI infinite fodder to organize our personal histories. If it chooses to highlight everything, nothing remains special. If it chooses to highlight something best forgotten, it’s needlessly engaging negative emotions.
Total Recall
This situation brings to mind two cinematic extremes. In the Hindi film Ghajini the main character (Aamir Khan) suffers from anterograde amnesia and must frantically rely on polaroids, notes, and tattoos just to survive. Today, AI would do the job.
Meanwhile, the corporate control of nostalgia seen in Total Recall, where artificial vacation memories are manufactured and implanted into minds, is already playing out on our lock screens. We are actively outsourcing our recall to an algorithm that dictates what we should feel emotional about on any given Tuesday. At this rate, we will forget how to recall because the attempt has been entirely outsourced.
This is where the fluorescent yellow ink finally bleeds through the page. Nature designed human memory to be fluid, imperfect, and deliberately blurry around the edges to protect our sanity and let us heal. When we hand the highlighter over to AI, it doesn't just ensure we never forget; it guarantees we will completely lose the ability to truly remember.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.