Rough Notes: Memory, Identity, and Transformation

Memory is the basis of identity, and the author argues that AI-era memory tools, from social media profiles to new hardware like the Tab and Rabbit R1, are fundamentally identity tools. The author supports this by pointing to Alzheimer's as the collapse of the self, to Christian ideas of pre-salvation identity, and to Snapchat streaks and reverse-chronological profiles as early forms of extended memory. The piece also draws on Frank Herbert's God Emperor Dune, where Leto II's prescience relies on inherited memory, and suggests AI may be a predator that will prey on human memory over the next 50 years.