I have had two strong thoughts lately, so I want to leave a trace of them here.
1. Having too good a memory is not always a good thing
A lot of AI tools want to organise everything without friction: throw in a pile of files, and they immediately give you a perfect summary.
But I think that can be harmful for the mind.
Our energy is limited. The brain only has so much bandwidth, so we are forced to forget actively—to decide what is not worth remembering and should not take up space in our minds.
Seen this way, human taste is a kind of art of refusal.
When everyone is using AI to collect information as much as possible, being able to let go of and forget unimportant things may become a rare ability.
So when we make AI products, decay and metabolism in the memory system matter a lot.
2. AI has no sense of time
For AI, obscure data from twenty years ago and a chat record from last night sit flat in the same database. There is no before or after, and no urgency that time is passing.
I notice this most clearly when I return to a conversation I started three days ago and continue talking to it. For me, three days have passed. For it, the last sentence from three days ago sits right next to the sentence I just wrote. There is no trace that time has gone by.
Without that sense of time, its choices will always feel cheap and cold.
So we need to give AI an eraser and a body clock: let notes that are not used often fade on their own, let late-night archives settle down. I have held in my complaints about NotebookLM for a long time. Because it is good, it also has parts that are really not good, so I both love it and hate it.
Taken together, giving a machine a sense of time, and letting memory decay and metabolise, is really a way of giving it a sense of life.