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"So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren't as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don't remember the reminders?"

"No matter how much our computers assure us they're backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole - from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs."

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"But there have been corresponding sacrifices. Over 20 years, I have turned over whole areas of competence, memory, authority and independence to the machines in my life. Along the way, I have become anxious about problems that didn't used to exist, indecisive over choices I never used to have to make, and angry about things I would once have been wholly unaware of."

"Past scandals, bad photos, critical comments: the internet has a long memory. As the EU considers the 'right to be forgotten', we investigate the growing business of online reputation management - and learn how you can airbrush your own past"

"The concept of robotic fabric is that of a soft exoskeleton or muscle tissue made out of electronic sensors and shape-memory alloys, all woven and configured into a cotton material. The end result is a sort of "skin" that can be placed around deformable materials that give the "robot" its shape."

"Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory. Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten."

"The IP Box costs less than £200 and can guess all possible four-digit passwords in 111 hours. The device bypasses the secure wipe triggered by ten bad guesses by "aggressively cutting the power after each failed PIN attempt, but before the attempt has been synchronized to flash memory." "

"A time is coming in which you may see more memorial accounts on Facebook than active users, with academics estimating that accounts belonging to the deceased will outnumber the living within 50 years."

"It is one of the first programs to combine an external memory with an approach called deep-learning, in which the program learns how to do tasks independently rather than being pre-programmed with a set of rules by a human."

"The reason to look at humans is because there are certain things that humans do much better than deep-learning systems. That doesn't mean humans will ultimately be the right model. We want systems that have some properties of computers and some properties that have been borrowed from people. We don't want our AI systems to have bad memory just because people do. But since people are the only model of a system that can develop a deep understanding of something-literally the only model we've got-we need to take that model seriously."

"y memory and recall are alarmingly good - borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I'd be describing something mid-sentence and I'd just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it. But my attention span - and my posture, eyes and sleep - are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline - 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens."

"Do screens destroy kids' executive functioning? In short: no. Some types of screen use (in particular, non-educational, 'fantastical' shows) may have short-term impacts on attention, memory, or inhibition. But these effects don't seem to be long-term, unless screen use is excessive and interfering with other important activities. And some screens (educational apps, certain video games) may actually improve executive functioning skills. "

"Of all the disturbing parts of this @CaseyNewton piece about Facebook content reviewers -- and there are many -- the one about people slowly coming to believe the conspiracy theories sticks with me https://t.co/ulDx3PEaWa"

""The idea that we can have counter-speech when [Facebook] groups become brigade mobs is ludicrous," said Renee DiResta, an expert in online misinformation and co-founder of Vaccinate California. "It makes just participating as an everyday citizen a high-stakes ordeal.""

"Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns. When they're disproved, believers 'just don't care.'"

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web."

"But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up with "swollen, Asian eyes". She complained about the lack of an explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: "thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. [teaching assistant]". She had apologised for these comments in the past, but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms McCammond took to Twitter again-to say that she had agreed to renounce the Teen Vogue job."

"Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. In an eerie twist, the patent says the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are deceased, which is almost a direct plot of a popular episode of Netflix's Black Mirror."

"It's sometime in the near future. Your beloved father, who suffered from Alzheimer's for years, has died. Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. Your brother raises the idea of remembering Dad at his best through a startup "digital immortality" program called 4evru. He promises to take care of the details and get the data for Dad ready. After the initial suggestion, you forget about it until today, when 4evru emails arrive to say that your father's bot is available for use. After some trepidation, you click the link and create an account. You slide on the somewhat unwieldy VR headset and choose the augmented-reality mode. The familiar walls of your bedroom briefly flicker in front of you."