I got to meet my parents and relatives after 3 years, on a tiring road trip across the West Coast (Santa Barbara â Las Vegas â Mammoth Lakes â Yosemite â San Francisco â Redwood Forest â Portland, about 2280 miles in 6 days).
More than the memories we made throughout the trip, I was struck by a lot of things. Being in AI research for some time now, memory is something that keeps me super curious. Typically, memory for agents can be thought of as being of two kinds: episodic and internal. This might not be the exact terminology (thatâs why this isnât a tech blog), but this is how I keep it in mind.
Episodic is where you explicitly keep track of events; itâs like taking a video of the event. You can replay the video to exactly verify the list of things that happened. Meanwhile, Internal is where you, in some way, remember the event because youâve experienced it. You have a trace of it in your mind, but you might not be able to verify things by replaying the memory. You might be able to visualize things, but itâs hard to guarantee that you remember everything the exact way it happened.
In my head, I believed I had been changing over time. I believed Iâd overcome most of what appeared to be problems or things people had pointed out as my problems. But while I met with my parents, I realized that I havenât changed much. â-Some things, they never change-â (Passenger â Everything). I thought I had become more of a patient person, but turns out, I have not. Maybe the function of getting annoyed is not just dependent on the person themselves, but also on the context and much more minute things. I thought I was not annoyed by a certain event X anymore, but turns out, annoyance depends on who does a certain event too.
Now thatâs very scary. What this told me was that the issues Iâve worked on arenât gone yet. Maybe from a meta-learning perspective, I should be working on the same event X but with multiple people and maybe then it will generalize better to a wider range of people I havenât worked with?
Another interesting aspect was that I realized the way I remembered my parents also surprised me. Most of these things are a form of Internal memory? So whatever you remember is in the weights? (Neurons of the brain?) For some reason, I felt that my memory of people was very different, but when I met some relatives in person, my interactions with them reminded me of who they are (not necessarily good or bad). Then I realized, itâs no different from how I remember myself. âSelfâ is a very funny concept, haha. This is kinda similar to the âhallucination problemâ in AI. The main difference I see is: in AI, these hallucinations donât change with time unless I change the weights myself.
Meanwhile, I feel like, with time, the internal memory starts getting modulated? Maybe itâs an evolutionary trait? Memories and events that one remembers of people start slightly getting diluted toward the good side? This includes oneself too! I thought I had handled things better, and so did my parents and people I know, but when I replay it with âtruerâ facts, I realize that wasnât the truth.
Maybe, naturally, our brains alter the âinternal memoryâ of ourselves to be considered good/nice people, to prolong our life? That would explain why people are very self-centeredâsometimes justifying every action they make. Well, in that case, it might not necessarily be just people around them supporting them through everything that spoils them and makes them think theyâre always right. But the immediate counter I can think of is how people around me hold anger/hatred toward people who are not around them and hold it pretty strong! Maybe itâs a function of time, and it might change? (Maybe not linearly, that they might hate but then start letting the hate go?) Would love to have someone explain this clearly to me.