Memory

We can talk about human enhancements and memory/cognition upgrades as if they're decades away, but it just isn't true. They're happening now. They're called the internet.

Faustus, over at ErosBlog, writes:

it’s the glorious age of the Internet, which means that with a certain amount of head-scratching and Google searching and perhaps a small outlay of cash, you can sharpen up strange old memories. And so I did. The clip indeed exists.

I read that, and I thought - well, yes. The truism that Google knows everything, or more accurately that the interweb knows everything, is actually not far off. I remember something, vaguely.. so I look it up online. Example: A music video to a song which was popular for all of a week sometime while I was in high school, and all I can remember is a few images from the video (no artist, no lyrics, not even the melody). Yep. The interweb knows what it's called, what year it came out, who it's by, and can even supply a copy of the clip.

I often joke about the internet + my computer being extra parts of my brain, but you know.. it isn't really a joke.