I spy with my little AI…

There – did you see it? That look. Watching. Not judging. Just vigilant. Less looking at the task the young woman is undertaking; more sensing the rhythm and space around her as she moves through it; the interactions that flow outwards from her actions and how she is receiving cues and clues from the environment in which she works; measuring her place within the eco system of people around her. This vigilance is fuelled by an innate understanding of the consequences that radiate outwards into the world from the small banal task she is undertaking. It’s a look that brings with it the wisdom of how things need to be done; what has been, what was learned from past undertakings of it, and what needs to be improved and what needs to be passed on or down. It is a look that holds within it the minutiae of what it means to exist successfully at an evolutionary creature level within a wider group and context. An innate understanding of the unseen and unspoken things that every individual part of the collective must carry with them for the whole to function effectively and efficiently as part of the whole.

Right now, my little AI cannot spy like this: this kind of observation is the most human of traits.

Under the veneer of our everyday decisions and actions, both amongst our nearest and dearest, amongst our work colleagues, and amongst our community and society in general, a staggeringly sophisticated genetically founded system is at work; a system that has enabled us to evolve and develop and progress as a species, a system that has helped secure out survival, improve our existence and experiences; and it may just be facing the greatest threat to its primacy.

Social memory plays a powerful and pivotal role in our human existence and culture, and as part of our increasing resilience as a species.

But in recent years our increasingly digital existence means that we are abdicating the recording, storage and archiving of our own immediate memory of any experience to digital devices and platforms. This is potentially creating ‘blind spots’ in both our individual and our wider social memory.

The Digital Graveyard.

We are in effect passing over the management of this human faculty to devices, platforms and algorithms over which we ultimately have no ownership or control. In time we will merely ‘lease’ our own individual and social memory from these platforms and devices, and, if we do not pay the access fee, these will become closed to us.

This potential issues here do not concern matters of efficiency – they concern the matter of human agency.

This separation between the human experiencing the memory and the receptacle of the memory and its accompanying evidential proof – recollection of action, environment, and all the sensorial data that comes with it, framed through conscious experience, both good and bad, and the consequence of its occurrence – is creating a Cloud based Model of Social Memory. And if you aint got a ticket you can’t come in

Tactile Memory

This is not just about the memory we store in our heads. It’s about the merchandise of those memories; the sensorial and evidential materials of its occurence. Anyone who’s binned that box full of photos under the bed in favour of ever increasing storage in the cloud can attest to the emotional dislocation and loss of tactile engagement with our lived experiences. Previously, our physical engagement with memorial items  – pictures, tokens, and keepsakes – triggered a deeper richer and more profound degree of recall than just scrolling through an abandoned cloud-cached ticker-tape of photos.

The Google Effect and what is commonly called Digital Amnesia has been identified as potentially severely impacting on the shared social, experiential, intellectual, and cultural economies we rely on to ground and guide us.

Amnesia v Dementia

Now, just a small point on language, I would suggest that Digital Dementia would be a more apt phrase to highlight the potential degradation of memory bought on by increased digital living because it captures the degenerative nature of the current digital trajectory – in direct relation to neuroplasticity and collective atropy; if it stops memorizing and synthesizing experiences, it loses the physical infrastructure to do so (Spitzer, 2012). 

Collective to Connective.

This erasure of social memory is, by its very nature not confined to the individuals within society. It affects every kind of collective: familial, communal, cultural, societal and, as a logical extension of those, organisational.

This phenomenon has been spoken to and commented on by various individuals and institutions. The trending viewpoint simply tells us that we are moving from a Collective to Connective memory model. This meme minded summary of this shift holds no indication of the deeper more nuanced issues and flaws in the act of moving from one to the other, it just neatly describes the act of doing so. In doing this it is in itself a proof point of the problem as it ignores the loss of ambient intelligence that comes with the shift.

 Inhumanity Inc.

Social memory within organisations is more than just a descriptor for an assemblage of recorded tasks and action input/output data points organised in a linear and modal manner distributed across the employee base of an organisation over time.

Social memory takes account of the more peripheral secondary and tertiary dimensions involved around the undertaking of those actions and tasks: the manner in which the individuals encode any learning or experience from doing them; the distribution of any knowledge associated with the undertaking of those tasks; the random effect of the intersection between different skill sets; and all forms of serendipitous interaction and any thinking or doing generated from the friction of unexpected combinations that might occur.

Cognitive Unloading Only

In this way Social Memory is an important link in securing the integrity and stability of Value Chains in organisations. Social memory makes organisations anti-fragile by fostering trust, identity, and shared norms among stakeholders, which helps to manage risks and promote responsible, sustainable practices. An algorithm focused on task efficiency would view serving these as an inefficient use of its time. It is also beyond its remit and capability. AI can replicate the documented dimensions and layers, but it cannot replicate human insight. This absence of tacit knowledge and real ‘lived’ experience in its ‘knowledge’ base creates a vacuum at the heart of the organisation, and we all know what nature abhors.

So to remind ourselves: what does AI do well? Knowledge preservation? Yes [though not of the tacit kind] Rapid retrieval? Yes. rapid Onboarding? Yes. Contextualising data. Yes. On a no-sleep 24/7 clock? Yes. But in the nuances, the subtle cues, the contextual ‘cat’s cradle’ of human interaction, it has absolutely no idea. This is problematic, especially in the organisational space.

Social memory within organisations is a both a form of energy – a source of momentum through time and space – and an anchor, keeping the organisation attached to its founding principles and the nature of how it has evolved. This evolution often occurs in an erratic sometimes confounding and often non-linear manner. Social memory is one of the primary evolutionary mechanisms in how organisations capture that flawed and volatile journey; how they learn and develop: how they progess.

In organisation and enterprises, social memory is directly involved in Building Trust and Cohesion; Knowledge Transfer and Learning; Enhancing Social Responsibility and Reputation; Facilitating Coordination and Adaptability, and Guiding Ethical Behaviour.

Delegating social memory to devices, platforms and algorithms, not only in regard to the interaction between machinery and their systems and for example, the Internet of Things, but also as agents, can lead to Institutional Atrophy, where the Enterprise loses its “collective hippocampus.”

The “Google Effect” is not just making us forgetful; it is reconfiguring our brains to be less capable of independent thought. It follows that anything that disrupts the role of Social Memory in an organisation also runs the danger of disrupting the Value Chain of that organisation.  

The Missing Link

In much the same way that the Google Effect and digital dementia is impacting the social memory or our communities and societies, the increasing digitisation of an organisation and its operations through the scale application of AI, replacing vast swathes of human tasks, and the absorbing of all associated learning, experience, and evolution back into the algorithm [ a closed environment], represents a potential threat to the future integrity and security of the organisation. The key word here is ‘replacing.’ To replace humans with Ai assumes an over simplified ‘swap in swap out’ application of AI across all tasks and roles. In certain grinding repeptitive tasksThis is a risky business. What we gain in short term cost efficiencies and productivity gains, especially at the most binary level of organisational tasks – the grind and churn of its operation, has a mid to long term cost on the culture of that organisation.  

Blockchain Bodies.

The construct, resilience and purpose of the hive mind at work in an organisation resides with Social Memory. Social memory in an organisation becomes an almost metaphysical entity; a source of universal and particular guidance and higher purpose. It is the thing that clarifies the role of every individual within the organisation; giving them place and value. It is also the great leveller, allowing every tier in the hierarchy, from the CEO to the Cleaner, value as a co-ordinate. In that way every individual in the organisation secures the integrity of the whole; a living, breathing, feeling, evolving blockchain.

This is what defines the fundamental and critical role of Social Memory in building resilience in organisations, and in harvesting the serendipitous value Social Memory brings both to the everyday undertakings of an organisation. But it seems this well documented truth will become increasingly at odds with the automation gold rush currently being touted. 

Digital tech and AI strategies are focused on isolating and hyper accelerating the specific task to exponentially improve performance. But this is to miss a wider value the human offers: a wider effect and impact created by a human undertaking that task as part of the fabric of an organisation.

Monkey Don’t See

A focus on cost reduction by parsing the task through ever tighter guidelines and instructive rails undertaken by the algorithm and agentic workforce does not value the agency and primary value of the human beyond the task. Therefore, the AI models do not build for these potentially invisible sources of resilience carried inside a workforce culture. They do not allow for the serendipitous value and enrichment to be found around the task.

Press the Remote

Learning the subtle nuances of ‘the role around the task’ cannot be ‘learned’ in a remote module framework. They might present a model for the behaviours and traits that are put to work in the role around the task, but they do not communicate and embed them in the same manner as person-to-person or team-to-person learning.

When the enterprise environment is viewed through the lens of Digital Dementia, this isn’t just a loss of data (amnesia); it is a loss of the intellectual vitality (dementia) required to innovate and survive. This shift is critical.

Human Tortoise, Digital Hare

When social memory—the shared collective knowledge, experiential understanding, culture, and intuition of a workforce—is outsourced to external platforms, the organization risks a permanent degradation of its intellectual capital. Replacing deep, collective learning with instant, superficial retrieval can lead to what is often called the “memory fade effect.” This can create a cognitive dependency and erode the very resilience it promises to enhance. 

 The not-so-magnificent 7

When we put this potential dependency and degradation under the microscope, we reveal 7 potential dimensions of degradation where a loss of social memory can adversely hinder or diminish the resilience of an organisation:

Tacit Vs Explicit: Organizational wisdom often lives the gaps and the spaces between the linear model tasks. It is a “tacit” knowledge—unspoken, experience-based insights shared between colleagues, such as mentoring or in-person problem-solving. AI, particularly Generative AI, excels at managing explicit knowledge (data, reports) but cannot capture the nuanced context of human experience, leading to a loss of organizational “know-how”.

Organizational Amnesia: As AI agents provide instant answers and summaries, employees may stop creating the formal documentation (meeting minutes, detailed reports, decision logs) that previously formed the backbone of corporate memory. When AI synthesizes answers, the “why” behind decisions is often lost, making it difficult for future teams to understand past decisions.

Uncritical thinking: Heavy reliance on AI for decision-making can lead to “cognitive offloading” where individuals lose the ability to independently evaluate complex problems or understand the underlying, nuanced context of decisions. This weakens the shared mental models crucial for resilience. 

Knowledge Fragmentation: AI copilots often deliver fragmented insights, and these insights may be scattered across chat tools (e.g., Slack, Teams) rather than stored in a central, accessible, and searchable “social repository.” This leads to fragmented knowledge, making it harder to track the evolution of a project or decision.              

History repeating: Without a strong, shared memory of past failures and successes, organizations can become stuck in a loop of “reinventing the wheel,” where new teams repeat mistakes made years prior because the context of those experiences was not preserved.                                                                                                                         

Mentorship RIP: The speed of AI can reduce the necessity for face-to-face mentorship and collaborative work, hindering the transfer of tacit knowledge, organizational culture, and deep expertise from senior employees to newer ones.                                  

Echo Chambers: AI systems can perpetuate or magnify historical biases present in their training data. This can lead to a narrowing of perspectives within the organization, creating “echo chambers” that inhibit critical evaluation and reduce the diversity of thought necessary for long-term sustainability

Resilient Fabrics Rule

So the next time you’re in a room where the answer is AI, now what’s the question? I’d suggest an enlightened evaluation of the impact of the AI not just on operational performance and the integration of ‘humans in the loop’, but also on the potential impact that degrading social memory might have on the very fabric of the organisation and it’s hard won, hard built culture over the longer term. I would also suggest that when constructing your AI approach, you consider a dual strategy that asserts human primacy in the construction of a best-in-class organisational fabric augmented and elevated by AI. [See my Loop in the Human/Human in the Loop article for more on this.]

No manner of automations and algorithms can currently replace the intangible strengths that lived experience, loyalty, belonging, and a collective wisdom built over time can bring.  

This is not a matter of cost: this a matter of survival and resilience, and an organisation’s ability to sustain itself through troubled and volatile times.

Go figure.