Are we losing our ability to remember?
I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”.  I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”.<p>Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains.<p>We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us.  We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature.  Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it.<p>Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains.  So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I <i>think</i> we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains.<p>Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then?  Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed.<p>Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc.  Another evolutionary tool.