Future memories: How to miss something in real time

This article is about the difference between recording a life and living one.

An essay based on my talk "Future Memories" from the Balkan Computer Conference (BalCCon) 2k25. You can watch the recording here:

Read more: crossing borders to BalCCon and my take on tech vs. hacker conferences.

---

At the end of the sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982), the android Roy Batty says, just before he dies:

"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain."

It’s one of the most quoted science-fiction monologues of all time. But familiarity doesn’t take away its weight.

Seconds before his life ends, Roy Batty asks us to imagine what it feels like to watch a lifetime of experience – vivid, unrepeatable, only yours – vanish with you.

A record is a poor translation of living

Not the facts: the facts could be recorded. Events can be stored as text, as photos, as videos. But even if someone had followed Roy Batty with a camera, what would have remained? A record of light, of sound, maybe of names and dates. Rudimentary, incomplete and two-dimensional. A poor translation of living. The richness of it – the smells, the awe, the terror, the feeling of watching something vast and impossible – would still disappear.

And that, I think now, is the danger of our own time: not only that we might lose our moments, but that we might miss them in real time – while they are still happening.

We live in a time obsessed with making things permanent. Everything can be stored, so we try to store everything.

The heavy weight of our archives

We take photos before we taste our food. We record concerts we barely hear through the tiny microphones of our phones. We narrate vacations in real time for an imagined audience who is also scrolling somewhere else.

And in the moment, we tell ourselves: this way, I’ll remember – not noticing that in recording, we might already be missing the very thing we’re trying to save. We are only growing and feeding an archive we will possibly never look at again. And the archive is heavy.

I’ve seen this from several angles.

As a medical doctor, watching people hold up phones in hospital rooms to record moments of grief or last words. As if capturing them in pixels might soften what was happening, or hold it still against time.

As a technology consultant, helping design systems meant to preserve everything forever. Every click, every message, every blurred photo filed away because we can. Because we think permanence equals meaning.

And as a writer, I notice how much of life doesn’t survive in the record anyway: the smell of a room, the silence before someone speaks, the strangeness of not knowing what time it is. Things that only stay if you live them fully, not perform them for later.

Real life, interrupted

It’s not just that we forget because we rely on devices to remember for us. We also forget because we’re less present in the first place. The act of saving interrupts the living.

Photo: author’s own

And it doesn’t stop there: We spend hours maintaining this immense memory infrastructure: passwords that slip our memories, links that die, apps that become obsolete, decades of photos scattered across devices we no longer own. We wanted memory palaces in the cloud, but we built cluttered archives instead for which we pay a lot of rent.

And somewhere in this process, machines don’t just keep our memories. They start shaping them: predicting what we should want, prompting us what to post, nudging what’s worth recording. Slowly, subtly, they start deciding what counts as a life well lived.

So how do we make space for real, lived memory – the kind Roy Batty had, fleeting but unfiltered – in a digital world that scripts and saves everything?

A personal experiment in remembering

In addition to my work as a doctor and medical informaticist, I’m also a writer. I’ve published both non-fiction books and novels, and a few years ago I took a 24-month prose writing course at a German institution. Six of those months were devoted to autobiographical writing, and during that time I began to look closely at my own memories, and in particular those from my work as a blockchain and tech consultant during the short, intense crypto startup bubble of 2017 and 2018.

It turned out that – maybe not so unexpectedly – my most vivid memories from that period weren’t about the actual day-to-day work, which mostly took place online, staring at a laptop. They were from the brief moments when I was somewhere else: travelling to foreign cities to consult with clients, or attending conferences. Those moments, though rare, seemed to take up far more space in memory than the hundreds of hours spent typing and clicking. It made me wonder: what kinds of memories does purely digital work generate? And what gets lost when our professional lives are mostly mediated by screens?

Out of those reflections grew a novel – still unfinished – with the working title “Androids, Dreaming”. In this novel, my protagonist Ruth (who is not myself but of course loosely based on myself) creates a list of seven rules: Rules for living with machines without letting them claim her inner life.

Seven rules for living with machines

They are reminders more than commandments, and they’re meant to protect the parts of us that can’t be backed up or versioned.

Also, these rules are fluid and under construction rather than set in stone. But they are her way of avoiding the kind of real-time absence our devices can create – her way of stopping technology from deciding what’s worth feeling, remembering, or dreaming. Her way of remembering that our attention, imagination, and agency are still ours to keep.

These rules aren’t evidence-based in the strictest sense. They don’t come from randomized controlled trials, or neuroscience papers about “brains on screens.” Conducting truly rigorous studies on well-being, memory, and presence in the context of digital technology is notoriously difficult – the variables slippery, the methods questionable, the results always partial. So, these are not universal truths. They’re distilled from direct experience: mine, and that of others I know well, from watching what tech can do to attention, to imagination, to the way we inhabit our own lives.

Here is Ruth’s list:

1. Don’t try to predict the future.

   Life isn’t a forecast. Don’t let your days become data projections.
   Machines thrive on prediction: every swipe, every pause, every search is turned into probabilities about what you’ll do next. But the richness of living comes from surprise, from moments that refuse to be plotted on a chart. Let your life unfold beyond the expected path, not as an algorithm would draw it, but as it actually feels in the moment.

2. Let machines assist you, never command you.
   Use them to clear paths, not set directions. Their rules are not yours.
   Technology is good at making things smoother, faster, lighter – but only if you choose the destination yourself. The moment you accept machine-made rules as default, you risk following a logic that wasn’t meant for your values or desires. Be deliberate: let devices help you, but don’t let them quietly tell you what a good life looks like.

3. Don’t dream dreams a machine has made up for you.
   Tools can help you act. They should never tell you what to want.
   Recommendation feeds, trend reports, “what everyone else is doing” – these are borrowed fantasies, stitched together from data. But dreams that don’t come from you rarely satisfy. Use technology to make your own visions possible, not to import someone else’s idea of meaning or success. Your imagination deserves sovereignty.

4. Treat machines as replaceable.
   You can lose them, switch them, discard them. They are not part of your self.
   Devices and platforms will try to bind you with sunk costs: your photos, your messages, your carefully cultivated profile. But none of these are you. If a tool stops serving you, leave it. Don’t let the fear of losing a machine feel like the fear of losing a limb. You are more than your interface.

5. Leave some moments unrecorded.
   Not everything needs saving. Some memories are meant to be lived, not stored.
   Digital archives promise immortality for our experiences, but in exchange they strip moments of texture. A sunset filmed is never the same as a sunset felt. Try letting some moments vanish – private, fleeting, just for you. Presence is not measured in gigabytes.

6. If switching off feels uneasy, switch off anyway.
   Unease is a sign you’re tethered too tightly. Step out of the current.
   When disconnecting feels impossible, that’s exactly when you need it most. A machine that makes you afraid to leave is trying to own more than your time. It is trying to own your mind. Test what happens when you close the lid, turn the screen dark, and remember that the world goes on without you being updated.

7. When talking to an AI about anything but facts, remember: you’re really talking to yourself.
   The voice you hear isn’t consciousness. It’s your own reflection, coming back altered.
   Machines don’t dream, desire, or understand. They remix patterns we’ve given them. When you ask an AI about life, love, meaning, it can only echo back fragments of humanity – yours, others’, no one’s in particular. The conversation might help you think. But know who’s really speaking in the silence between the words: you.

What can’t be backed up

Future memories aren’t built from archives or algorithms. They’re the ones we live deeply enough to carry, even if no device records them, even if they fade. The rules aren’t there to keep you safe from technology – they’re there to keep you awake in your own life, to remember that experience can’t be optimized or predicted or outsourced.

What matters most won’t fit on a feed or in a file. It will vanish, like Roy Batty’s moments in the rain. And that’s not a failure – unless we’re too distracted to notice them while they’re here.

The real art of future memories is not just keeping them, but not missing them in the first place.

---