Rick Rashid dreams of the ubiquitous remembrance agent.

Rick Rashid: One of our research projects a few years ago asked, If you started to harvest all the information on usage, what could you do? Logically, your computer knows where every piece of text in a document comes from. Did you type it? Did you cut and paste it? Where from? Did it come from an e-mail? And so on. Extrapolate that idea: computers could use the knowledge of where information comes from to very powerful effect.

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Technology Review: Life has been a process of forgetting.
Rashid: But it doesn't have to be anymore.

Moore's Law is relatively well known, and its effects are widespread. Analogous trends in mass storage are less well known, but their impact on the culture could be equally transformative.

Q&A with Rick Rashid