Guy “Outsources” AI to Manage His Own Memory

“It comes with a catch: using a memory tool like this has the potential to make your biological memory worse over time.”

Technology writer Shubham Agarwal made the decision to “outsource” his memory to assistive AI in order to overcome the very real difficulties that humans encounter when attempting to retain all that they read online.
“Frequently during the day, I find myself Googling articles I read only a few hours ago because I can’t remember more than a few key words,” Agarwal wrote for Insider. He explained how his memory has essentially been destroyed by the never-ending digital publishing ecosystem, the skim-style reading habits it promotes, and the fact that it’s just harder to recall text we read on screens than it is on paper. (Comparable.)

Although Heyday, an AI-powered web browser extension, appears to be a helpful app, there may be a serious drawback. This is something that Agarwal discovered.
“In the three weeks I spent with the app,” he said, “I found it was effective at helping me remember things, but it comes with a catch: using a memory tool like this has the potential to make your biological memory worse over time.”
According to its website, Heyday scans almost everything you use on that web browser, including but not limited to “documents, messages, files, newsletters, notes, presentations, spreadsheets, [and] tweets,” in contrast to competitors that essentially just make lists of websites you’ve visited frequently and require a lot of user input.

The information is subsequently categorized, from which the app generates dynamic prompts for the user in search results, articles, papers, and other formats. Additionally, as the machine gains knowledge along the way, the customized algorithm simply becomes more accurate over time. (Heyday also states that all of the data it gathers is encrypted.)

According to Agarwal’s account of his experience, the app appears to be similar to several other AI assistants that have emerged in recent years, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. To the credit of the Heyday team, people already rely on a variety of tools both digital and analog to aid with their memory of things like to-do lists, calendars with notes, appointments, and reminders, among other things. Naturally, human assistants and secretaries play a crucial role in providing administrative support to individuals and enterprises.
Professor of information and psychology Andrew Dillon of the University of Texas informed Agarwal that “our capacity to process incoming information is naturally limited” and that trying to understand something requires “paying a cost in terms of memory and comprehension or time.”

That in mind, AI like Heyday does seem helpful, and humans are more predictable than we’d generally like to think. Even so, there’s something at least a little eerie about an app that, without requiring manual input, both “remembers” what you might need to recall and thus prompts you to do so.

And while the Heyday CEO Samiur Rahman told Agarwal that the app is intended to “increase the creative output of individuals” by allowing them to focus less on recall and more on “thinking, creativity, and analysis,” it’s hard to shake the feeling that something deeply human might get lost in-between especially when a function of the mind as essential as memory can hardly be considered a lowly administrative task.

“If you can access a poem whenever you want, why memorize it by heart? Knowing your math tables is useless if you can just ask Alexa the solution. Do our minds need to be exercised in order to remain fully functional, just like our bodies do?” Dillon went on to caution that using an app like this could make people’s memories more dependent on technology than they already are. “I think there’s some truth in this.”