Memorybot - by Andrew Hoskins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From a murdered teenager being interviewed as though he were alive to a widow speaking with a chatbot made through cloning the digital relics of her late husband, AI-generated versions of the deceased are becoming uncanny yet convincing in their human-like form. Are personal memories, so central to our sense of self, lost to a future where we feel compelled to embrace he human-like comfort of bots? Are the most traumatic and joyous parts of human existence forever subject to AI's manipulation of memories?

Memorybot explores the consequences of generative AI for the nature and survival of human memory. Hoskins argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new societal paradigm, a battle between humans and machines in AI's shaping of reality, its erosion of anonymity and in making human forgetting impossible. As the book reveals, AI technologies are producing a new kind of memory, reflecting a past that never existed.

Written by a leading international scholar of memory studies, Memorybot is a haunting read for anyone concerned about the growing influence of AI technologies on personal and public lives, and for the fields of media, psychology, sociology, history and memory studies.

Review Quotes

"A forcefully argued and valuable plea to constrain AI's hunger for remembering and to retain nature's gift of forgetting."
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, University of Oxford and author of Delete

"Insightful, unsettling and urgently necessary, this book explains how AI is changing not just what we remember but what memory itself is now becoming."
David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University

About the Author