By | Abhijit Bhaduri |Keynote speaker, Author and Columnist
Who owns your memories? You would own them if you were the one who had created the memory to begin with. Oh no, you are not the only one who created your memories. So should you worry if someone else alters them?
I wait anxiously for Estelle Metayer @Competia to start the Clubhouse. Estelle is an expert in Competitive and Strategic Intelligence. Her research focuses on how managers, CEOs, and board members build and improve their strategic planning and/or competitive intelligence function to avoid strategic blindspots.I always feel nervous when she asks me “What did you learn this week?” I wonder if what I learned is a give away of how little I know about anything.
Then Philip Sheppard @PhilipSheppard walks in. Philip was music director for the London 2012 Handover sequence at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Paralympics closing Ceremony, writing all scores. Recording with Jimmy Page and the London Symphony Orchestra, he re-scored & recorded all 205 of the world’s National Anthems.
What got us started was a discussion on the notion of eternity. The role of memories. How are they created and can they change over time?
The big news of the week was that Deep Learning technology can now turn photos into animated videos. If you have never seen the person actually speak or smile, all that you had as a memory was the photograph and your imagination. When you see the person smile and blink, the memory of that person is altered forever. It replaces the memory you had. Is that ethical?
History is not written by victors
How was the memory of your childhood shaped? Have you seen photos of the event? Or heard someone share a story?
Memories are often a trade-off between facts and fiction.
Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon? ‘ Who writes the history books? You will tell me that the winners of the battle write the history. So do those who are in power. Think harder and you will discover that the one who actually writes history is the writer. With a quick turn of phrase, a story and some “facts” pasted on a page recreates that moment forever. Writers contribute to cultural memory. Now even photographers shape history.
Same event different stories
Someone interviewed three people about the origin story of Lucas Films. They all had different takes. When the author wrote it up, all of them agreed that it was accurate. That is narrated by MJ Rubin @droidmaker
Rubin is an entrepreneur and photographer. He made movies with Bernardo Bertolluci; premastered CDs for the Grateful Dead; spent years at Netflix and Adobe… His career began at Lucasfilm in 1985, the experience that lead to DROIDMAKER.
Experience and the memory of it
Very recently someone asked Kapil Dev, the former captain of the Indian Cricket Team that won the world cup. What was that moment like?
The remembering self is a storyteller
“We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.”
Daniel Kahneman says that we confuse between the experience and the memory of the event.
“So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they’re really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That’s not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.”
Should we really care if the memory is altered?
The bride and groom often do not have any recollection of their wedding day. It is all a big blur. The memory is crafted by the story the wedding video creates. People look at the photos and videos and believe it was a happy occasion and forget all the chaos that reigns in a typical Indian wedding. Those stories are what we hold on to and feel happy. Unless it is a painful memory, don’t let the machine change the story you have been told.
Will you let machines strip away the emotions and present the facts – and only the facts?
Republished with permission and originally published at www.abhijitbhaduri.com
