🤝 The future of remembering
Dear curious minds,
Despite the ongoing developments in AI, no significant announcements or updates made it in this issue. However, new perspectives were shared by Sam Altman and Tiago Forte, which are featured as media recommendations. These perspectives serve as the foundation for the shared insight below.
In this issue:
💡 Shared Insight
How Technology and AI Reshape Our Memory
🌟 Media Recommendation
Tiago Forte Describes How AI Supercharges Your Second Brain
Sam Altman Discusses AI’s Impact on Privacy, Energy and Jobs
💡 Shared Insight
How Technology and AI Reshape Our Memory
The ability to retain and recall the information we consume has long been a challenge for humans.
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturer and philospher
The quote above by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American lecturer and philosopher who lived in the 19th century, states what is likely true for most of us. We consume information but can hardly recall details about them at a later stage.
If you are up to using technology, this has already changed. Services like Readwise empower us since 2017 to be more active in our own knowledge retention. By highlighting and annotating book passages that resonate with us, we create a curated library of what truly matters for us. Readwise's spaced repetition feature, which resurfaces these highlights at optimal intervals, further strengthens these connections. This is a significant step towards better recall – an effort to bridge the gap between consumption and lasting knowledge.
With the advancements in Generative AI, an even more radical shift seems to be on the horizon. On the one hand, the newest AI models show a nearly perfect needle on the haystack performance, where the AI retrieves is asked to retrieve a piece of content from a long input. The latest model from Google, named Gemini 1.5 Pro, showed nearly perfect performance in inputs as long as 7.5 million words. As reference, there are with 1,100,086 a little more than 1 million words in all seven original Harry Potter books. On the other hand, there are devices like the Limitless Pendant, which is a wearable that records audio signals 24/7. Putting these things together, you can imagine an AI assistant that doesn't require manual selection. It would consume everything you see and hear – articles, podcasts, conversations – building a personalized knowledge base. Furthermore, it would analyze your written and spoken output to understand your preferences and interests. This universal personal assistant, powered by AI, sounds like a leap forward for recalling and using consumed information.
I can imagine this future in which you want you have a personalized AI that has read every email, every text, every message you’ve ever sent or received. Has an access to a full recording of your life. Knows every document. you ever looked at, every TV show you ever looked at.
— Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO
This leads to a crucial question: Is it truly beneficial to have an AI assistant that remembers everything we consume and produce? Or, is there value in the human method of experiencing and forgetting, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests in his quote? While an AI that retains infinite information might enhance learning and productivity, it might also lead to an over-reliance on technology for memory and thought processes, potentially reducing our own cognitive abilities.
Likely the answer lies in a synergy between human and machine. AI can be a powerful tool for surfacing connections and insights from the vast amount of information we consume. However, the human element – the act of conscious selection and reflection – remains crucial for meaningful knowledge retention and personal transformation. The ideal assistant might not just remember everything we consume and produce, but rather empower us to effectively distill and utilize that information, ultimately enhancing, not replacing, the human learning process.
🌟 Media Recommendation
Tiago Forte Describes How AI Supercharges Your Second Brain
In a recent blog article titled “Will Artificial Intelligence Replace the Need for Second Brains Entirely?” Tiago Forte describes the impact of today’s AI capabilities on his information processing framework CODE.
C: capture
O: organize
D: distill
E: express
In contrast to my exploration of how AI impacts the CODE framework, Tiago states that only the middle parts, organize and distill information, will be highly influenced by AI.
The impact of AI is particularly noticeable in the middle stages of the creative process, such as organizing and distilling. AI technologies have automated these steps, minimizing the need for time-consuming manual work. Connection to other notes will be shown to you and the extraction of the relevant information will also be powered by AI.
Capturing raw data still largely depends on human efforts, such as jotting down ideas or collecting observations.
Similarly, the final expression stage requires personal intervention to infuse the outputs with individuality, style, and context, underscoring the enduring necessity of human creativity.
While AI is rapidly advancing, it will not entirely replace the need for a personal knowledge management system or "Second Brain" to capture ideas and information from various sources and to store the connections generated by AI tools until they are ready to be expressed as a finished product.
Sam Altman Discusses AI’s Impact on Privacy, Energy and Jobs
Sam Altman was recently interviewed at Stanford and MIT, with the MIT interview providing more insightful comments on the future of AI.
He envisions a future where everyone has a personalized AI that records and knows everything about their life, raising questions around utility, privacy, and safety.
AI training and operation consumes a lot of energy. However, Sam argues even 1% of global energy use is worthwhile if AI yields greater returns through new discoveries and efficiencies.
Contrary to some views, Sam predicts AI will replace and change many jobs. People will need to adapt and upskill.
He believes this is the best time ever to create an AI startup, given the growth and disruption AI is driving across industries.
Future GPT versions are likely to evolve into reasoning engines without today's world knowledge, representing the next algorithmic stage.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is written with the aid of AI. I use AI as an assistant to generate and optimize the text. However, the amount of AI used varies depending on the topic and the content. I always curate and edit the text myself to ensure quality and accuracy. The opinions and views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the sources or the AI models.