very interesting wired piece on sort-of transhumanist software
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak
Yeah, I too found this article utterly fascinating. I downloaded supermemo and have found it hard to follow, but haven’t really invested the time. I’m not sure beyond language acquisition how powerful a tool it really is .. would have liked more reflection on the utility of memorization for things beyond languages.