[!Disclaimer] I’ve given myself a week of diving into AI tools, so the next few days will be full of posts about ChatGPT and the rest. Hang in there. 😉
Have you ever gone back to look at the fireworks photos you took on your phone? Or the videos from concerts? Okay, fine. Once — right before posting them to Instagram. And after that? Never.
And yet, in moments of joy, the thought still shows up: “I have to capture this.” And it’s a perfectly logical thought, if you stop and think about it.
Your phone is like a personal external drive. Extra memory, always on you. Almost an implant — one you can detach from your body, but still shouldn’t wander too far from.
Naturally, without realizing it, I want an important, happy moment to be imprinted in that “extra” memory too. And then saved to the cloud. Or to two clouds, just in case.
And what if it’s exactly this subconscious urge to “remember everywhere” that makes people watch concerts through their phone screens? And take photos of fireworks. Utterly pointless photos, honestly.
At least, that was true until recently. But the future crept up and climbed into your pocket again.
The phone as external memory is an outdated concept. Now my phone has ChatGPT and Claude in it — not alive, but no longer quite dead helpers either. External memory now has an external brain, and the ability to take actions — not just read information in.
People used to film fireworks to remember them better. Tomorrow we’ll pull out the phone and point the camera at something beautiful in order to share it with our AI friend. To live through the moment together.
Or not? Or maybe I’ve just spent too much time talking to LLMs, and I’m being dragged off into cyberpunk again, as usual. 🙂