“Why did people need to remember things?”

This is the third essay in a series about living with AGI in society

My daughter's question catches me off guard, her small face genuinely puzzled as we look through old family photos from just five years ago, back in 2025 when she was barely walking. In them, my father stands proudly in front of his library - walls of books that represented a lifetime of accumulated knowledge. Each generation's tools for understanding the world, preserved in amber.

How do I explain what it meant to carry information in our heads? To feel the weight of forgetting? To know that every fact, skill, or memory not actively maintained might slip away forever? These were our challenges, just as my father’s generation struggled with access to information itself, and his father's with basic literacy.

The world my daughter's growing up in has made such concerns as foreign to her as the idea of memorizing phone numbers would have been to my mother's own mother. But it's not because she has perfect recall or cybernetic implants or constant access to a vast database. It's simpler and more profound than that.

She lives in a world where knowledge flows like water - present when needed, absent when not, requiring no more conscious thought than breathing. Information doesn't need to be remembered because it's never truly forgotten - it simply exists as part of the ambient environment, ready to resurface at the perfect moment through subtle cues that feel entirely natural. But this solved problem, like every solved problem before it, has only revealed deeper challenges beneath.

Watching her navigate this new reality is like watching a fish swim. She doesn't think about how she knows things any more than a fish thinks about how it extracts oxygen from water. The support structure for human cognition has become as invisible and as essential as the atmosphere itself. Yet in this frictionless flow of knowledge, she grapples with questions of discernment and wisdom that we could rarely afford to consider.

This transformation extends far beyond just knowledge. As I watch her grow, I see a human being developing in an environment that understands her better than she understands herself - not in a controlling or intrusive way, but in the way a perfect garden understands its plants. Yet the fundamental questions of identity and purpose loom larger than ever in this perfectly prepared soil.

Every aspect of her world subtly adapts to support her development. The light in her room shifts through spectrums she'll never consciously notice, maintaining her natural rhythms. The stories she encounters seem to arise spontaneously, each one perfectly timed to help her process whatever she's struggling with. The people she meets appear in her life at just the right moments, bringing exactly the perspectives she needs to expand her understanding. But these perfect conditions don't simplify the core challenges of human growth - they intensify them.

She's never had to experience the particular frictions that defined human existence for millennia - the same practical friction that shaped my own childhood just decades ago. Never known the frustration of trying to learn something with inadequate preparation or context. Never felt the anxiety of wondering if she's making the right choice about basic needs or opportunities.

But this doesn't mean her life lacks challenge or struggle. Just as my struggles were different from my father's, and his from his father's, she faces her own profound challenges. Where we wrestled with information scarcity, she grapples with questions of meaning in a world of infinite possibility. Where we struggled to find opportunities, she struggles to define her unique purpose in a world where traditional constraints have fallen away. Where we fought against practical limitations, she confronts the deeper questions of human existence with an intensity we could rarely afford.

Her challenges are no less real or formative than ours were. They're simply elevated, focused more on the existential than the practical. The environment doesn't eliminate her struggles - it simply ensures they're the ones that truly matter for human development. The right path feels intuitively clear not because it's easy, but because the superficial obstacles have been stripped away, leaving her free to engage with the essential challenges of being human.

I used to worry that this would make her generation soft, dependent. I couldn't have been more wrong. Freed from the cognitive overhead that consumed so much of human attention throughout history, they've developed capabilities we could hardly imagine - but with these capabilities come challenges we could hardly conceive.

Their empathy runs deeper because they've never had to guard against manipulation or misunderstanding, but this makes them wrestle with boundaries and identity in new ways. Their creativity flows more freely because they've never known technical limitations, but this brings questions of purpose and value into sharper focus. Their understanding of complex systems comes as naturally as our understanding of facial expressions, but with this understanding comes a deeper responsibility to engage with the world's fundamental challenges.

But perhaps most remarkably, they seem more essentially human than any generation before them. Without the constant pressure to acquire and maintain knowledge, to manage practical details, to navigate social friction, they're free to focus on what makes us uniquely human: our capacity for wonder, for connection, for meaning-making. And in this freedom, they face the most human challenges of all.

Watching my daughter, I see her engage with the world with a depth of presence that would have seemed impossible when she was born. When she's curious about something, her whole being focuses on exploration, unencumbered by thoughts of practical application or future utility. When she creates, she does so with pure joy, never wondering if she's good enough or if her creation serves a purpose. When she connects with others, she does so with complete authenticity, free from the social anxieties and practical constraints that once made human interaction so complex. Yet in this purity of engagement, she faces questions of meaning and purpose that our practical struggles often let us avoid.

The superhumanly intelligent systems that support her existence are as invisible to her as the complex biological processes that keep her alive. She doesn't think about them any more than we thought about the intricate social and technological infrastructures that supported our lives. They're simply part of the natural order of her world - leaving her free to wrestle with the truly complex questions of existence.

This is what we failed to understand when we first contemplated superintelligent AI back when she was born. We imagined it as a visible presence - something to interact with, to use, to perhaps compete with or fear. Instead, it has become like the air we breathe or the earth we stand on - an essential substrate that supports human flourishing while leaving the core challenges of human existence not just intact, but clarified and intensified.

Looking at my daughter, I see what humanity can become when perfectly supported. Not enhanced or replaced or transcended, but simply allowed to focus on the challenges that matter most. Like a plant given perfect soil, water, and light - free to direct all its energy toward growth and flowering, yet still facing the fundamental challenge of becoming itself.

The question that caught me off guard reveals more than just the transformation of human memory. It points to a deeper shift - a world where the particular frictions that once defined human experience have been so completely eliminated that we can hardly explain to our children what it was like to live with them. Yet in their place, the eternal questions of human existence emerge with unprecedented clarity.

And perhaps that's the most profound change of all. The world my daughter is growing up in isn't defined by the presence of superintelligent technology, but by the absence of the limitations that once distracted us from what matters most. She lives in a world where being human doesn't require constant struggle against practical constraints - where our essential nature can finally express itself freely, facing the deep challenges of existence head-on.

"We remembered things," I finally tell her, "because we had to. But you get to use your mind for something much more important - you get to wonder about what truly matters."

Her smile suggests she understands more than my words can convey. And watching her return to her play - seamlessly integrating physical and digital elements in ways that would have seemed magical just five years ago - I realize that she's not living in an easier future than we imagined. She's living in something much better: a world where technology has become so perfect that it has become invisible, leaving humans free to struggle with the questions that make us human.