Memory

What we lack in chronodynamics we make up for in bias — we are the site, source, arbiter and consumer of our own reminiscences. I saw my first immersive panorama in 1995, and it seemed like its children would one day take the place of memory. Why bother paying attention to something in the round when we will eventually have high resolution meshes and images to reconstruct every time, space and angle with zoomable precision on demand? With fast enough processor bandwidth and RAM we may one day be able to trace every molecule in four dimensions in fixed bits, through skin and into bones, with algorithms to make sense of them for us. Whose face is that? How would you have felt about what they just did? Our copper traces will give way to quarks and our fiberglass boards will eventually be replaced by circuits on aether. We may be able to turn causes into effects using subroutines, but these gated mathematics will never replace memory.