May 18, 2007

Scholar Suggests Building Computers to 'Forget'

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

As humans, we are regularly flummoxed by what we have forgotten — the name of someone we've just run into at a show, the location of the corkscrew or bottle opener, one of our many passwords.

What we remember is, for most of us, less of a problem.

Now a public-policy expert warns that computers, by default, remember way too much — and perhaps should be trained to forget things the same way we do.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor

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