We live in a time when artificial intelligence is almost exclusively framed through the lens of creation. Systems generate images, texts, videos, and simulations at a pace that exceeds human absorption. The dominant narrative celebrates speed, scale, and productivity, while quietly assuming that more output equates to more progress. Yet this framing leaves an important question unasked: what happens to meaning once creation becomes frictionless? What happens to culture when experiences multiply faster than they can be remembered?
Yuk Hui’s work offers a critical lens through which to rethink this moment. Rather than treating technology as a neutral, universal force, Hui insists that every technological system carries a worldview. Technologies are not just tools; they are expressions of cosmologies — ways of understanding time, nature, human relations, and value. From this perspective, the problem with contemporary AI is not its power, but its universality: a tendency to flatten difference, erase locality, and impose a single technical logic across vastly different cultural contexts.
This universality has profound consequences for memory. Most digital systems today are built around immediacy: real-time interaction, instant feedback, perpetual updates. Memory, in this environment, becomes an archive rather than a process. Experiences are captured, stored, and indexed, but rarely allowed to mature into meaning. What we gain in access, we lose in depth. What we gain in volume, we lose in continuity.
Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics challenges this trajectory. Cosmotechnics proposes that technology should emerge from, and remain embedded within, local cultures, values, and temporalities. There is no single way to build technology, just as there is no single way to experience time or remember the past. Memory, under this view, is not universal data — it is culturally situated, shaped by rhythm, ritual, and collective life.
Seen through this lens, AI does not need to be a creator to be transformative. Its most meaningful role may be that of a memory device — not a system that produces endless novelty, but one that helps cultures maintain coherence across time. A memory-oriented AI would not aim to capture everything. Instead, it would help communities decide what deserves to be carried forward, what should remain ephemeral, and what should fade.
This reframing radically alters the ethics of design. If AI is treated as a memory infrastructure, its success is no longer measured by engagement metrics or output volume, but by its ability to respect context. Such systems would operate at a different tempo. They would allow delay. They would privilege reflection over reaction. They would recognize that memory is not formed in the moment of experience, but in the space that follows it.
Hui’s critique of globalized technology is especially relevant here. When AI systems are built as universal platforms, they inevitably impose a single model of remembering: one optimized for speed, scalability, and interoperability. In contrast, a cosmotechnical approach would allow memory systems to differ across cultural environments. The way a city remembers is not the way a community remembers. The way music is remembered is not the way an exhibition is remembered. Technology should not erase these distinctions.
Designing AI as memory infrastructure also shifts the relationship between humans and machines. Rather than replacing human judgment, such systems would support it. Rather than automating meaning, they would preserve the conditions under which meaning can emerge. AI becomes less a producer of experiences and more a caretaker of continuity — a quiet participant in cultural life rather than its driver.
This has particular resonance in cultural spaces where presence matters deeply: festivals, museums, performances, rituals, and cities themselves. In these contexts, technology must be careful not to dominate the moment. A memory-oriented AI would remain invisible during experience, intervening only afterward to help reconnect fragments, provide context, and sustain relationships across time.
Ultimately, Hui’s work reminds us that the future of technology is not a technical question alone. It is a philosophical one. The challenge is not whether AI will shape memory — it already does — but whether we can design it in ways that honor plurality, locality, and temporal depth. To do so requires abandoning the idea of a single technological destiny and embracing a multiplicity of technological paths.
If AI is to have a meaningful cultural future, it may not be as a creator competing with human expression, but as an infrastructure that helps cultures remember themselves. Not faster. Not louder. But more carefully.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz.Club General Manager
