The machines will retain, in flawless preservation (though the completeness of what they remember will occasion some dispute, for a time) not only what their owners experience but what their owners think they have experienced, and will sort out the one from the other. More and more, such distinctions will be left purely to the machines. And it will be noticed that the experience to be retained is itself becoming a dwindling fauna, clung to by sentimentalists, from afar, who still lay aside their machines for days at a time and secretly yearn for the imaginary liberties of the ages of forgetting.
W.S. Merwin, “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow”
