Are we losing our ability to remember?

You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.

Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.

There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.

It's like my brain realises I am intending to go back and read the string 2 numbers at a time, over and over again, so it doesn't bother remembering. But if I just read it out once and don't think about it until I need to recall it, my brain has the information available for me.

I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there.

Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017.

Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.

The fact that it was mostly applied at civil politics tells more about their society than about the tool...

Without specific memories, how can you tell whether or not you have been getting results? :)