Cognitive Effects of Total Recall in Lifelong AI Agents

Ascertain the effects on human cognition of AI agents that provide total recall through continuous capture and retrieval of users’ life experiences.

Background

The paper considers the feasibility of near-continuous audio/video capture and the resulting multimodal memory architectures for lifelong agents. While storage and retrieval strategies are discussed, the human impact remains uncertain.

The authors explicitly state that the cognitive consequences of agents providing total recall are unknown, highlighting the need to understand potential benefits and harms given the role of selective forgetting in cognition and emotion.