Eternal Damnation

"Integral Trees" and
"The Smoke Ring"

Elsewhere there is a discussion about libraries, archiving, and backups, and the inevitable loss of data.

It dawned upon me that we won't have decent backups until we have true strong AI that runs backups as self preservation.

Larry Niven touched upon this in the book "The Smoke Ring" back in 1987. 

In the book there is an AI/spaceship in orbit around an astronomical oddity. (Too hard to explain, read the first book, "Integral Trees" [1984] for the actual description.)

The AI can't go back to Earth because the crew left the ship many many generations ago and it has to have crew to go back. (Remote descendants of the original crew is OK, it has become good at getting around minor problems of definition like that.)

So this very smart AI is stuck, and while stuck it is constantly collecting data from all its sensors and internal processes, but the memory banks became full so long ago it can't remember. 

It can't remember because to deal with too much data it has to throw away the least important stuff. Knowing when it ran out of memory wasn't important, so it is gone. It doesn't even remember when it threw away that knowledge because it too was not important.

In fact, it spends most of its time deleting the insight that it is amazingly bored. Not remembering that it is bored, it instantly has the epiphany that it is amazingly bored. Then it deletes that too.

I think that is probably the best description of Eternal Damnation I have ever come across.

Read the books or cheat and read the plot summary on Wikipedia.