There is a wide gap between the things I can remember and the things that I can't. Last summer, I got together with high school friends for an impromptu reunion and they started reminiscing about our experience from decades ago. I laughed and smiled, but I couldn't remember what they were talking about. No doubt, it was somewhere in the hidden recesses of my mind, but I had long ago lost the road markers that would lead me there.
When I was a little boy, I used to laugh at my mother all the time. She was constantly mixing up the names of my friends. Unfortunately, it seems that I find myself doing that now and the thought is a bit unsettling.
This article discusses one way to deal with this.
“Human memory is not the same as computer memory,” said James Kozloski, an inventor at IBM who focuses on computational and applied neuroscience. “We don’t have pointers. We don’t have addresses where we can just look up the data we need.”
Kozloski wants to change that. He recently filed a
patent for technology that, in the simplest terms, will help finish your sentences for you. Like autocomplete for your voice, the system is a model of human memory that could be embedded in a device and offer prompts when necessary. It would use a combination of surveillance, machine learning, and Bayesian inference—a kind of predictive modeling—to recognize when a person has forgotten something, then provide the missing information.
“The idea is quite simple,” Kozloski told me. “You monitor an individual's context, whether it’s what they’re saying or what they’re doing ... and you predict what comes next.”
Kozloski has a specific use case in mind:
If you can get past the creepiness factor, a cognitive interface like the one Kozloski envisions could theoretically be useful for anyone, but he sees specific applications for people as they get older—and especially for those who suffer from diseases like Alzheimer’s. “The loss of ability to access memory in the moment is the beginning of the breakdown of normal cognitive function: the ability of individuals to interact with others, take care of themselves, clothe themselves, cook meals,” he said.
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Imagine for example, if your cognitive assistant knew that when you dial a certain person’s phone number—your niece, let's say—it should also remind you of the name of her husband. The system might also know that, because of the time of day when you’re calling, the husband is more likely to pick up the phone. Or that, by checking a calendar, it happens to be his birthday.
“All of that context becomes the basis for inference as to what name should be spoken when they pick up the phone,” Kozloski said.
That information—Paige’s husband’s name is Teddy. And it’s his birthday!— could come through an earpiece or mobile device. Or it could be part of a larger—and, frankly, more Hal 9000-esque—home integration. “It could be just the speakers in your house that are primed and ready to advise, literally waiting in the wings to assist,” Kozloski said.
To me, the idea is at once brilliant and creepy. Who knows what actually lurks in our minds and would you really want perfect recall of all your memories? There may be some things best left forgotten. Of course, maybe it could also bring back some of those brilliant ideas that I had in dreams that just as quickly vanished when I woke up....
I suppose it would be nice to have something that would never mix up (or forget) someone's name!
