And Would the Computer Forget More as It Gets Older?

By way of a Slashdot discussion, Harvard Professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has published a paper arguing that computers now remember too much -- and that they should learn, like humans, to "forget" stuff that no longer matters.

"I propose a simple rule that reinstates the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia, and I show how a combination of law and technology can achieve this shift," he writes in the introduction.

This goes against everything we've come to expect of computers and the Internet in the past decade. In fact, one of the great achievements of search and storage is that it allows humans to forget MORE stuff. We don't remember anybody's phone number because it's stored in our cell phones. We don't have to remember what we said in some e-mail last month because we can find it again. We don't have to remember the synonyms for "stagger" or the spelling of "colossal" because Word will look it up.

In fact, on the other extreme, Microsoft researcher and computing legend Gordon Bell has spent the past several years developing MyLifeBits -- a project to figure out how people can record, store and retrieve everything that ever happens to them.

I will say this: To some extent, there is an institutional way for personal computers to forget, or lose, major chunks of what they had stored. It's called a Windows upgrade...

. □