The original note, as written at the time
The artificial Intelligence campaign will have to tackle the challenge of fragmented fluid memory. When teaching a machine to learn and think you need to allow it to collect a lot of data but only store crucial parts of the data required for thinking. In this way it can be possible to have RAM combined with ROM. The intelligent machine must be able to collect the data and manipulate it at the same time in the same container.
Ongoing development
The campaign for artificial intelligence will have to tackle the challenge of fragmented fluid memory, and it is a harder problem than it sounds.
We have built machines on a distinction that intelligence does not recognise. RAM is where thinking happens; ROM is where knowledge sits. One is volatile, the other permanent, and the machine must move things between them to work. A mind does not do this. A mind remembers and reasons in the same act, in the same substance, which is why a smell can produce an argument.
So the requirement is that RAM and ROM become the same thing: a store that is written to while it is being read, that holds the crucial parts and lets the incidental parts fall away, and that does not need a transfer to think with what it knows.
The word I would keep is crucial. The mistake now is to keep everything, because keeping everything is easy and storage is cheap, and a machine that keeps everything does not remember — it retrieves. What is needed is a mechanism that decides, at the moment of collection, what is worth keeping for thinking, and discards the rest without a committee deciding the policy.
That is what human memory does and it is not a limitation, it is the feature. We forget nearly everything and the forgetting is what makes the remainder usable. A system that cannot forget cannot abstract, because abstraction is the act of throwing away the instance.
So the research programme is not bigger memory. It is a container in which collection, storage and manipulation happen in one substance, with a rule for letting go. And the rule cannot be a filter bolted on afterwards, because the filter is the thinking.