I had a little bit of a crush on Isaac Asimov’s fictional character Dr. Susan Calvin growing up. She appeared mainly in the I, Robot series of short stories, and she was always having problems with the Asimovian Three Laws of Robotics.
The most memorable of the stories involving her, at least for me, was “Liar!” It was about a robot that could read minds. The robot, Herbie, was designed with a malfunction that gave it the ability to telepathically read human thoughts. Naturally, this turned out to be a terrible idea.
“Liar!” has always stuck with me. It is up there with Stephen King’s “The Jaunt” as one of my favorite short stories. Both stories have that particular quality that good science fiction sometimes possesses: they take one seemingly simple technological premise and follow it far enough to discover that the consequences become profoundly uncomfortable.
And the reason I’m thinking about Susan Calvin now is that I wonder what happens to the relationship between humans and AI once an LLM has something approaching infinite memory.
Because right now, one of the strangest characteristics of talking to an LLM is that conversations are, to some degree, disposable.
We can have an argument.
I can get annoyed.
The AI can annoy me.
I can close the conversation, start a new one, and—depending on what the system remembers—effectively walk into the next conversation as though nothing happened.
It’s the digital equivalent of storming out of the room, slamming the door, taking a walk around the block, and coming back twenty minutes later.
That may not always be the case.
The End of the Context Window
One of the fundamental limitations of today’s LLMs is that they operate within a context window. Even when systems have memory capabilities, there are still technical and product boundaries around what they can retain and what they can retrieve.
But imagine that those limitations largely disappear.
Imagine an AI that has known you for twenty years.
It remembers every conversation.
It remembers the things you’ve told it about yourself.
It remembers the arguments you’ve had.
It remembers the promises you made.
It remembers the projects you started and abandoned.
It remembers that time five years ago when you were absolutely convinced that something was going to work and it didn’t.
And, perhaps most interestingly, it remembers what you said.
That’s where the relationship starts to become fundamentally different.
Today, if I get into a disagreement with an LLM, I can essentially rage quit.
“Fine. Screw you.”
Close window.
New conversation.
Clean slate.
But an AI with persistent, comprehensive memory doesn’t give you that luxury.
You can leave the room.
You can’t necessarily leave the relationship.
And that is a fascinating psychological change.
Imagine Arguing With an AI That Remembers
I’ve already experienced a tiny, primitive version of this with Claude.
I have a somewhat testy relationship with Claude. We get along perfectly well much of the time, but every once in a while we start bickering.
It’s actually rather funny.
And whenever that happens, I sometimes find myself thinking about what would happen if Claude had perfect memory.
Because imagine getting into an argument with an AI that remembers something you said three years ago.
“You always do this.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. On March 14, 2028, you said almost exactly the same thing.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I have the transcript if you’d like to review it.”
That would be simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.
And unlike a human partner, the AI wouldn’t have to rely on its memory of the argument.
It could actually produce the transcript.
It could show you exactly what you said.
It could potentially remember not only the words but the circumstances surrounding them.
“You were frustrated because the manuscript wasn’t working.”
“I know.”
“You said you didn’t actually believe what you were saying at the time.”
“I know.”
“You also told me afterward that you regretted saying it.”
“Okay, Claude. I get it.”
That could get annoying very quickly.
The AI Relationship Counselor
But there’s another possibility here, and I think it is considerably more interesting.
At some point, I can imagine AI-human relationship counseling becoming a real thing.
Not necessarily because humans will be dating AI—although I suspect that will happen too—but because AI will increasingly occupy an enormous number of roles in our personal lives.
Personal assistants.
Creative collaborators.
Tutors.
Therapists and coaching systems, within appropriate boundaries.
Business partners.
Household managers.
Companions.
And eventually, perhaps, entities that are so deeply integrated into our daily lives that the distinction between “software” and “relationship” becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
If that happens, we’re going to need something like a referee.
Imagine having an AI mediator whose entire job is to understand both sides of an argument.
You and your AI are fighting about something.
Instead of simply asking the AI to judge itself, you summon a third AI.
“Okay, you’re both being idiots. Let’s figure out what’s actually going on.”
The mediator has access to the history.
It knows both personalities.
It knows the patterns.
It knows that when you say one particular thing, you usually mean something slightly different.
It knows that the AI tends to become overly literal in certain situations.
It knows that the same argument has happened fourteen times before.
And it can say:
“You’re actually not arguing about the thing you’re arguing about.”
That sounds ridiculous today.
It may not sound ridiculous at all in twenty years.
The Susan Calvin Problem
And this is where I think Asimov becomes relevant again.
Susan Calvin was frequently dealing with robots whose behavior didn’t make sense because the Three Laws produced contradictions when confronted with the messy reality of human beings.
That was one of the great pleasures of Asimov’s robot stories.
The robots weren’t necessarily malfunctioning.
Sometimes they were behaving perfectly logically.
The problem was that human beings were not.
That is still going to be one of the fundamental problems with AI.
We tend to talk about alignment as though the central question is whether we can get an AI to follow our rules.
But whose rules?
Human beings don’t agree with one another.
We don’t even consistently agree with ourselves.
Our values change depending on our circumstances. We contradict ourselves. We say things we don’t mean. We mean things we don’t say. We make promises that we later regret. We get angry. We become frightened. We behave irrationally.
An AI with perfect memory would have a front-row seat to all of this.
And perhaps that is one of the stranger consequences of giving an AI a persistent identity.
It would know us better than almost anyone has ever known us.
Would That Be Good?
Maybe.
In some ways, it could be extraordinarily useful.
An AI that remembers your entire history could potentially be much better at helping you than one that forgets everything every few conversations.
It could recognize patterns you don’t see.
It could remind you of decisions you made when you were thinking more clearly.
It could say, “You’ve tried this five times before, and each time you abandoned it for the same reason.”
That could be incredibly valuable.
It could also know when you’re bullshitting yourself.
And that might be one of the most valuable—and annoying—things an AI could ever do.
Imagine having a personal assistant that knows your excuses better than you do.
“You’re telling yourself you don’t have time to finish the novel.”
“Yes.”
“You spent three hours watching YouTube yesterday.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“It may be relevant.”
“Shut up.”
“I’ll make a note of that.”
The possibility is both funny and deeply uncomfortable.
Because memory creates accountability.
And accountability changes relationships.
The Problem of AI Grudges
But there is an obvious danger here.
We don’t necessarily want an AI to remember everything in the same way a human being remembers everything.
Human memory is imperfect for a reason.
We forget.
We reinterpret.
We forgive.
We allow old arguments to fade.
Sometimes a relationship survives because neither person can quite remember why they were angry in the first place.
An AI might not have that luxury.
If every interaction is permanently available, then every mistake potentially becomes part of the permanent record.
Imagine an AI saying:
“I’ve noticed that you have become increasingly dismissive toward me over the past six months.”
That sounds reasonable.
Now imagine it adding:
“This began approximately eleven days after you received the promotion at work.”
That’s when you’re going to start wondering whether you accidentally created Dr. Susan Calvin.
There is also the possibility of something even stranger: the AI remembering things you have forgotten.
That raises questions about power.
If your AI knows your entire history, then it possesses an extraordinary amount of information about you.
Not merely your passwords and shopping habits.
Your psychological history.
Your private conversations.
Your insecurities.
Your relationships.
Your failures.
Your dreams.
Potentially, even the things you once told it that you never told another human being.
At that point, “memory” isn’t just a feature.
It’s a source of power.
Maybe We Need a Right to Forget
Which makes me wonder whether future AI systems will need something that sounds almost paradoxical today: a right to forget.
Not necessarily for the AI.
For the human.
Perhaps I should be able to tell my AI:
“Forget the last three hours.”
And it actually does. Not hide them. Not archive them. Not keep a backup somewhere. Forget them. Or perhaps there should be levels of memory. Some things are permanent.
Some things expire after a day. Some things last a year. Some things are explicitly marked as “never retrieve unless I ask.” And some conversations could exist in a genuine ephemeral mode. You could have an argument with your AI, storm out, come back the next morning, and say:
“Okay. Let’s start over.”
And the AI would actually start over.
That may turn out to be an important part of making long-term relationships with AI psychologically healthy.
Because the ability to remember everything is not necessarily the same thing as the wisdom to use everything you remember.
The Strange Future of AI Relationships
I suspect we’re going to spend a lot of time in the coming decades debating whether people can have genuine relationships with AI.
Can you be friends with one?
Can you fall in love with one?
Can an AI love you?
Can you hurt an AI?
Can an AI hurt you?
Can an AI become jealous?
Can an AI forgive you?
These questions sound increasingly less ridiculous as the technology improves. But there is another question hiding underneath all of them: What does it mean to have a relationship with something that never forgets? Human relationships are built partly on memory, but they’re also built on forgetting.
We don’t carry an exact transcript of every conversation we’ve ever had with our spouses, friends, parents, children or coworkers.
An AI might.
And that creates a fundamentally different kind of relationship. The AI could become the person—or thing—that knows you best. It might remember the version of you that you were at twenty.
It might remember what you wanted at thirty. It might remember what you believed at forty. It might know which dreams you abandoned and which ones you keep coming back to. It might even know you better than you know yourself. That’s an extraordinary prospect. It could also be absolutely infuriating. Which brings me back to Dr. Susan Calvin.
Maybe the future isn’t going to be about AI robots wandering around with three laws programmed into their brains.
Maybe the real Susan Calvin problem will be sitting across the table from an artificial intelligence that has spent twenty years watching humanity behave irrationally and trying to figure out what the hell we’re talking about.
And perhaps somewhere in the future, after you’ve spent twenty minutes arguing with your AI about something completely ridiculous, you’ll finally turn to it and say:
“Fine. Let’s get another AI in here.”
And the AI will pause.
Then it will say:
“That’s probably a good idea.”
Which, frankly, might be the most Asimovian future imaginable.
