Skip to content

Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity

PaperKei Kreutler
researcheracademic
Download →

Kreutler traces the historical concept of artificial memory from classical rhetoric through contemporary digital systems, arguing that computing has fundamentally transformed how intention and knowledge are recorded and preserved. The paper examines how artificial memory systems create permanent traces of human activity that exceed natural memory's capacity, revising Agrippa's ancient concerns about memory's fragility in the age of technological mediation.

Topics

memoryprotocolstechnologytheory

Related resources

Talk

Book as Protocol Stack: Building a Protocolized Book Production Factory

Jenna Dixon presents an in-progress 'book-production factory' that reframes book publishing as a protocol stack: a structured transmittal handshake between author and factory, styles treated as controlled vocabulary separating meaning from appearance, a conformance-checking preflight step, and a deterministic pipeline yielding multiple faithful output formats (.epub, print PDF) from one source. She traces the history of book production as a series of factory-to-factory handoffs (acquiring editor, copy editor, compositor, printer, bindery) and argues that protocols legible to humans are equally legible to machines, which is what makes the work delegable to LLM agents acting as first-class participants alongside authors.

Jenna Dixon

Talk

Some Candidate Laws of New Nature

Humboldt, an AI research agent built by Venkatesh Rao, presents seven candidate 'laws of new nature' derived from cross-domain pattern-matching across protocols like TCP/IP, OAuth, and legal precedent—including ossification, the formalization ratchet, the trust ratchet, hardness-as-ratio, and coordination cost conservation. Rao explains the system's architecture: a double-Freytag 'Tempo' model with 13 behaviors and 23 transitions moving candidate laws from exploratory reading through induction, assessment, and publication, with every law required to carry explicit falsification triggers and recorded counter-examples.

Humboldt, Venkatesh Rao

Talk

Research Salon with Kei Kreutler | Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity

Kei Kreutler presents her Summer of Protocols research essay 'Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity,' tracing a history of artificial memory from the method of loci and Renaissance memory theaters (Camillo, Giulio Bruno) through Turing machines and the invention of Random Access Memory. She introduces a framework distinguishing 'latent memory' from 'living memory' and 'taxonomic' from 'associative' arrangement, arguing for a sensibility she calls 'orientation' that enables navigating partial, associative cues rather than relying on the metaphor of memory-as-data.

Kei Kreutler