Beyond Permanent Memory: Digital Forgetting in the Age of Intelligent Systems, Reconciling Human Cognition, Machine Unlearning, and the Right to Be Forgotten

Dhairya Sindhwani

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i05.58292

Beyond Permanent Memory: Digital Forgetting in the Age of Intelligent Systems, Reconciling Human Cognition, Machine Unlearning, and the Right to Be Forgotten

Author(s)	Mr. Dhairya Sindhwani
Country	India
Abstract	Digital information has acquired an unprecedented permanence, with personal data, from social media activity to sensor-generated records, persistently stored, replicated, and embedded within intelligent systems. Unlike human memory, which relies on adaptive forgetting to regulate cognitive load, emotional well-being, and flexible decision-making, artificial intelligence systems often retain information indefinitely, even after deletion from original datasets. This mismatch between biological and digital memory raises critical ethical, legal, and technical challenges, particularly regarding privacy, autonomy, and the societal consequences of living in a “never-forgetting” environment. This paper provides a comprehensive review of digital forgetting by integrating insights from cognitive psychology, AI research, and regulatory frameworks such as the European Union’s Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF). From a technical perspective, machine unlearning techniques, including selective retraining, influence-function methods, and certified removal algorithms that aim to erase the influence of specific data from trained models without full retraining, are examined. From a cognitive standpoint, how adaptive forgetting principles can inspire AI architectures capable of context-sensitive, ethically informed data management is explored. From a legal perspective, the efficacy and limitations of current privacy regulations in addressing the distributed and latent nature of modern AI memory are analysed. This interdisciplinary synthesis highlights gaps between legal mandates, technical feasibility, and human cognitive needs, proposing a roadmap for future research that emphasizes certifiable unlearning, policy harmonization, and human-centric design. Ultimately, reconciling the permanence of intelligent systems with the adaptive imperatives of human forgetting is essential to safeguarding privacy, autonomy, and societal trust in an AI-mediated world.
Keywords	Digital Forgetting, Machine Unlearning, Right to Be Forgotten, Human Cognition, AI Ethics, Privacy, Adaptive Memory
Field	Computer > Artificial Intelligence / Simulation / Virtual Reality
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 5, September-October 2025
Published On	2025-10-19
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i05.58292

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Beyond Permanent Memory: Digital Forgetting in the Age of Intelligent Systems, Reconciling Human Cognition, Machine Unlearning, and the Right to Be Forgotten

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