Memorybot: AI and the End of Human Memory

by Andrew Hoskins

From a murdered teenager being interviewed as though he were alive to a widow speaking with a chatbot made through cloning the digital relics of her late husband, AI-generated versions of the deceased are becoming uncanny yet convincing in their human-like form. Are personal memories, so central to our sense of self, lost to a future where we feel compelled to embrace he human-like comfort of bots? Are the most traumatic and joyous parts of human existence forever subject to AI's manipulation of memories?

Memorybot explores the consequences of generative AI for the nature and survival of human memory. Hoskins argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new societal paradigm, a battle between humans and machines in AI's shaping of reality, its erosion of anonymity and in making human forgetting impossible. As the book reveals, AI technologies are producing a new kind of memory, reflecting a past that never existed.

Written by a leading international scholar of memory studies, Memorybot is a haunting read for anyone concerned about the growing influence of AI technologies on personal and public lives, and for the fields of media, psychology, sociology, history and memory studies.

144 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication November 17, 2026

About the author

Andrew is a software engineer and author whose mission is to live in a society that is empathetic and connected. That mission has threaded through his past work at Facebook, as well as his current work at Oculus VR and his book, Amnesium.

He wrote Amnesium, in part, as a reaction the heavily partisan and politicized national discourse in America today. He drew up several interesting, far-flung characters who would be ideologically opposed, gave them a gripping situation that brought them together, and saw what happened.

Virtual Reality also has the potential to bring far-flung people together in deep, surprising ways. Enabling people to have consistently good experiences with strangers online, and in some cases form lasting connections with them, is one of the biggest challenges facing the VR industry. He’s excited to be pursuing this goal at Oculus VR.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he hones his storytelling skills playing pen-and-paper role-playing games. You can follow him at www.facebook.com/AndrewHoskinsAuthor.