Memory Will Matter Less and Less

That's human memory, not computer memory.

Dylan Matthews, writing at Ezra Klein's blog, addresses a complaint by Bill Keller about the lack of need to memorize in an internet age. I haven't read Bill Keller's piece and I generally agree with Mathews that when you look something up you tend to remember it.

But I want to stress that memorizing will increasingly become more pointless, and we will be better for it. It will likely be within my lifetime in fact that constant connection to the internet, beamed directly onto my retina will be possible where my speech and that of those around me is constantly analysed. What becomes most important then, is not someone's ability to remember anything, but their ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that information.

There are plenty of analytical people who have horrible memories. Up until now these people have been left out of professions that require both great memories AND analytical minds such as doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists. In the future, the ability to call up the name of a disease based on a set of test results and symptoms will be accomplished by software instantly in exactly the same way it is called up from memory now. Picture a Terminator-like heads up display that's constantly on, listening to your patient, updating a list of diseases with probabilities in realtime as they describe whats wrong with them.

In the future, only the analysis will matter. Students in math class who know when to apply an equation and can recall it, will be indistinguishable from students who know when to apply the equation only. This is not a bad thing for the simple fact that memorizing takes a lot of time away from more analytical experiences where memorization happens in the more natural manner that Matthews describes.

I keep thinking of scenes in Scrubs where Kelso asks questions on the proper treatment for some obscure disease. Is it really a bad thing if they all know the answer right away just because it's packed in an always on, head mounted computer doohicky?