Rethink: What parts of being human depend on forgetting?

Dear Rethinkers,

A friend who works as a designer in AI recently told me about a device she’d started wearing called a Plaud NotePin. It listens to everything she says and hears throughout the day — team meetings, passing conversations, chats with her husband, therapy sessions— and then turns it all into transcripts, summaries, action points.

At first it sounded like yet another productivity tool that I definitely didn’t want, the kind that promises to save lots of time while subtly rearranging my life around it. Sensing my skepticism, my friend went on about how she discovered it could build evolving mind maps from weeks of captured snippets. She was amazed how quickly new idea patterns started to surface and half-formed thoughts connected to new ones. “It feels like having a conversation with my own memory,” she said, “It is honestly blowing my mind.” In good or bad ways, I wondered.

As someone who spends most of my work time (time I love by the way) sifting through old notebooks, dog-eared articles, and digital rabbit holes in search of hidden connections, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

On one level, it gives me the ick, not just from a privacy perspective, but the sense of another thing being outsourced. On another, it feels like peering at an early prototype of a new cognitive tool: not just remembering for you, but thinking with you across time. If that concept is even partly true, the implications will be less about productivity or efficiency and more about how ideas are born or memories rediscovered. Now that’s interesting…

So this month’s five ideas explore the implications of what Scott Belsky recently and aptly named “the era of summarized living”:

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