What Proust Knew About Memory That Silicon Never Will

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust wrote one of the most comprehensive works of literature about our attention, our memory, and our entire lives. How would he view today's world, in which AI dominates our private and business lives? His words suggest that disruption occurs not only when a machine thinks for us, but also when people forget to be attentive.

With every AI app, AI tool, and AI instrument, we externalize our memories, interpretations, and our entire lifestyle. These are precisely the areas that Proust described as necessary for slow work and slow living. Calculators replace our cognitive efforts, and modern AI replaces our cognitive designs and summaries. AI now replaces even our voice in service applications and as a partner for business matters. In some cases, it replaces us for the most private aspects of human life.

In Proust's day, telephones, photography, and aviation were like alien beings because they offered a new perspective on distance and were considered dangerous at the same time. Today's AI systems allow us to recognize the collapse of cognitive distance and give us seamless access to computer-assisted storage and the infinite archives of the digital world. This makes restoring our own analog world all the more important, as machines have taken over every part of our daily lives.

Our Predictable Daily Smartphone Rhythm

Our attention, from waking up in the morning and reaching for our smartphones to watching a movie selected by an algorithm in the evening, is becoming predictable and programmable. A programmable infrastructure, captured by technical interfaces and artificial arrangements, whose task is to collect our data for their training, to present these so-called insights and so-called creative results for our demand. The 19th century was about the revolution in the new mechanics of work, the 20th century was about global communication, and the 21st century is about the most intimate relationship between humans and machines.

Proust's work In Search of Lost Time focuses on freeing experiences from boring habits to show how a daily routine can destroy our perception and how an involuntary memory, the famous scene in which an adult drinks a cup of tea, more specifically lime-flower tea, into which he has dipped a small, shell-shaped pastry called a petite madeleine, can break the automated rhythm of the day and restore the depth of time.

Our architecture of living would be liberated from machines if we adhered to Marcel Proust's view of slowness and the long detour via emotions, not as inefficiency, but as the only way to recognize something authentically.

Today's AI-driven culture tends to go in the completely opposite direction: it compresses our days into data, everything has to be summarized quickly, and every moment of lingering or boredom is rejected. We tend to demand an immediate response from AI, without any disruptions or friction. From Marcel Proust's point of view, the dangerous moment is not that we lose information in the process, but that we lose the moment that emerges as a point of silence and calm, in which we can judge and discover for ourselves how this moment really feels.

For Proust, art is the separation of the personal view from the noise of the world, a slow way of being something else despite the constant chatter of the whole society.

The Danger of A World Personalized by AI

The point of conflict is that AI promises us complete personalization, but at the same time undermines everything that makes a person's soul unique. The type of personalization that AI offers adapts to our previous clicks and likes. In his work, Proust shows that highly intelligent self-discovery arises from the opposite of our preferences: from shocks caused by outsiders and people in moments that no AI would ever recommend to us.

While AI systems aim to work in real time, Proust's monumental literary work is always linked to a retrospective view, in which meanings can be gained years after the events. Today's organizations or individuals who only optimize the day in real-time analysis will not benefit from insights from the past. Insights that can only be gained by people who have experienced a particular moment and can reinterpret an experience.

What Proust Already Knew About LinkedIn

What would be possible is to view AI not as a threat to humanity that destroys our creativity, but rather as a simple support for our human experience in the creative process. We can use AI to create synthetic speech and synthetic images and develop synthetic strategies that save us the years of tedious work that people in Proust's time had to do, spending thousands of hours writing and reviewing documents and thousands of pages.

In his work, Proust exposes the lazy snobbery and social clichés of his time. His characters tend to misjudge reality and fail. Proust's description of these themes helps us to clearly recognize when we have concrete guidelines for the use of AI at a professional level and when we have critical users who, with eloquent language, create works that are understandable not only to a select few, but to all of us. In this sense, AI is less of a foreign body and more of a perfect assistant for our very complex world.

The true value of AI deployment in the coming year lies not in having greater access to more intelligence in machines and data centers, but in developing standardization with criteria that counterbalance the overwhelming and misguided influence that machines will exert.

Proust would distrust today's system, which constantly recommends the perfect path and the perfect relationships for our lives, because his entire work shows how vulnerable we are and how incomplete our presence in this world is. Aren't today's LinkedIn salons and Instagram accounts also based on a masked representation of individuals, similar to the salons of his time? Proust emphasizes the importance of inefficiency, with paths and decisions that we do not fully understand, but which later become the complete material for our insights.

Where is the true experience in a digitized world? Without remembering the past and learning from history, we will never gain authenticity in the now.

What Should a CEO Take Out of This?

Let's take a look at your role as a leader and how you can learn from Marcel Proust's work and philosophy:

• In a fast-moving, AI-driven world, let slowness and solitude happen for your employees. Give your offices spaces where AI cannot listen and where employees can talk about their experiences without any instrumental pressure, and where employees with a long-term membership in a company can share memories that can be seen as the groundwork for learning and striving for younger workers.
• Let the machine store the facts, but do not let it interpret them; let employees use these facts to build personal success stories.
• In Marcel Proust's world, many characters seem perfect from the very first moment, only to be later discovered as fake personalities. AI agents show us how a perfect business or private life is possible. The literature shows that this perfectionism must always be checked by humans, not by machines.
• AI should never be the sole perspective or perception in any business case. It should be the catalyst but not a filter for the perception. We should always take the closer look and should not outsource the creative and critical thinking of human beings to machines.

So here is the question I want you to sit with me longer than is comfortable:

When was the last time you experienced something that no machine could have remembered for you, because it was not information, but presence?