Slashdot Mirror
Your Life On a Hard Drive
Iddo Genuth writes to point us to his The Future of Things blog, where he has put up a rumination on the idea of recording one's whole life, beginning with Vannevar Bush's 1945 "Memex" (from the same essay in which he envisioned digital photography and advanced electronic computers). This serves as introduction to an interview with Microsoft Research's Gordon Bell, arguably the first man to attempt recording (most of) his life. From TFoT: "If humans may be viewed as the sum total of their memories, then at our doorstep may be a life changing revolution: the ability to store one's entire life experiences on an accessible and easily searchable file. In this article, we examine this idea, as well as some of the problems involved in its application."
I don't like this idea at all. I commend them for tackling such a large endeavor but I wish their efforts were concentrated on something more helpful to society.
... it's also the state of my mind at the time. That cannot be recreated. You can't show me a video of my first kiss and expect me to feel the same thing I felt back then. I dare say that my senses and state of mind are near infinite.
When I experience something, it's a multitude of things. It's not just my five senses which can be recreated to within some threshold
I would view it and try to remember what I was like back then but I'd still be me now. I've still kissed ten or twenty other girls in passion. You could never put me back there and it's laughable to aim for that goal.
I also believe that humans are dynamic beings and that we are more than "the sum total of our memories..." These may affect behavior but they do not necessarily define us.
More importantly, I'm more intelligent now. Show me the video clip of me pulling a garden hose off a shelf in kindergarten and I'll wince as the sledge on top of it plummets off of the shelf and destroys my big toe. I'll watch it over and over and over again and dwell on how stupid I was. Or, I'll move on with my life.
People who want to do this are possibly suffering from a legacy complex where they are worried about what mark they leave on the world. Maybe this will satisfy you and maybe you'll make your kids experience these but it's not going to change the facts--there's a low probability anyone but your offspring will remember you. Hell, I don't even know any generation prior to my grandparents and neither does history.
Things happen to us--for better or for worse they happen. Let's experience them and move on. I don't dwell on pictures, I don't dwell on home videos, if you want memories of joyous occasions then record them but nobody wants to watch me go to work day after day.
My work here is dung.
"Humans" clearly aren't properly viewed as the sum total of their memories. First, there's an incongruity between the concept "human" and the concept "memory." Second, even if we ignore this incongruity, shouldn't it be "total of their experiences", not memories?
As if watching other people's home videos isn't torture enough already...and those are supposedly the more interesting parts of their lives.
Just imagine having to sit through your uncle's slide show documenting every second of his vacation, including the 5 minutes he spent standing in front of the mirror scratching his ass. No thanks.
Reminds me of a movie I just saw called "Final Cut">The Final Cut with Robin Williams. In the movie he plays a "cutter". His job is to splice the full memories of people (who have had a chip implanted into their brains) into little films to play at their funerals. It was a very interesting movie.
That said... what a waste of space. How much of my life will I spend watching TV. Good thing we might be able to record all that soon.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I spent the first 50 years of my life recording, but now I decided to watch what I recorded... I'll be a hundred before I get to do anything except watch myself! But I'm just dying to see how it will end!
I have to admit, the idea is certainly cool, but there are some experiences that I would just as soon forget. Along with that, giving others the ability to catalog and disect my life as they wish isn't necessary a fun thought.
I remember back some years ago when the occasional person would try to document their life or wear around a camera so that people could see what they were doing as they went through-out the day. The idea seemed cool, but I wouldn't want to be on the sending end of that data.
If people complain about current "invasion of privacy" issues, then they shouldn't jump into line to strap anything to themselves that record every aspect of their life. Sure I can see the benefit of being able to turn on something to capture a moment... but we already have that with the current line of digital cameras. The only thing that I could wish for is to make them smaller so that I can carry it around better.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
In the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan series (try http://www.dendarii.com/, or wiki her) there is a man with a "chip in his brain", an electronic memory device being used as memory augmentation. It ends up malfunctioning with terrible consequences (he's in charge of a rather charged political climate), but it's a great idea, being able to remember everything as if it happened, not even yesterday, but 30 seconds ago. Useful.
I think I saw this movie.
By proxy- it may prove easier to stand on the shoulders of giants if you can quickly learn from all the mistakes and ideas everyone on Earth has ever had. If you have a huge, collective database of every grain of human advancement or epiphany, our worldwide progress may explode- not to mention the drastic smoothening of your everyday life.
What? There are many many people who endeavoured "to store one's entire life experiences ". It's called having a diary. Anne Frank had one .. as did others.
But the author of the article should either be more specific than generalizing that Gordon Bell was the first to try to keep a record of all his life's experiences. Now, granted Mr. Bell definitely has kept track and made accurate representations of stuff in his life *more*, *better*, and *more complete* than others. But this comes down to semantics and technicalities, so either define some arbitrary minimum or don't say he's the first to try to keep a record of life's experiences.
I can imagine that for most people, this would actually upset them.
People's memories are colored by everything from their state of mind at the time to associations with other experiences (that may not even seem related).
I think most people would be upset to find out just *how much* their cherished memory of an event differs from the actual thing as it was recorded.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Isn't the CIA doing this for all of us nowadays anyway?
gleh.
Anyway, I think it's neat. I'd do it, sorta. The recording gear would be like shoes: they'd come off when I went home. Simply being able to say "Why'd Bill say/do that?" or "What was the license plate of that guy who parked next to me when I went into the safeway? I've got a big honking scratch on my car now" and go to the video and see would be be awesome.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Crashed, so now I need to get another life
what if we could record your state of mind at the time too?
All police officers, politicians, and other government workers should be made to record their on-the-job activities at all times. That way we can be sure our tax money is not being wasted, our politicians are not making back room deals, and lying by police officers does not continue in the court room.
It would seem we may have the next best thing to immortality. Combine memory (or better yet, experience) capture and cloning, and you can perpetually recycle yourself without forgetting anything that makes you you.
Maybe we can get a government grant to develop this idea as a defense against terrorism.
Assuming a world where people record themselves all day became a reality. A large part of the recording would I assume, be of the subject watching the earlier recordings...
So you would have a recording of a person watching their recording... then let's say they watch that...
Ok, yeah, other people would be watching the recording... so you would have recordings of *them* watching someone else's recording, and so on. Pretty soon, you'll have to get someone to get up and actually *do* something - and those people would be highly compensated (think of the advertising revenue for life-tapes of "The Guy who went skydiving that one time")
Perhaps even reality TV is just the first step to this new nightmare vision of the future...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Not to be a cranky misanthrope about it, but how about reducing the number of people
on the planet before espousing the notion of using untold billions of tons of resources
to manufacture enough hard drives to record billions of tediously repetitive, uninteresting,
sad, pathetic life stories of human after human after human after human after human?
What is this going to do to inter-human relations? Are we going to become ultra politically correct knowing that everything we ever say and do may be recorded by someone else on their personal memex system? What about privacy issues? Is a thousand "Little Brothers" not just as bad as a "Big Brother"? As much as the technical hurdles of such a project appear to be daunting, they are nothing compared to the social implication of such a system becoming ubuiquitous. That said, I believe memex is coming and will be prevalent within years rather than decades. Now, that's a daunting prospect.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Doing this would bring new meaning to the terms "Blue Screen Of Death" (death unseen coming from above), "Kernel Panic" (playing with things you shouldn't) and "ABEND" ("Hello Darwin Award!!").
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
This reminds me of a short film that was once showed on the space channel here in canada.
I showed this futire world where everyones life was recoreded from birth and then saves onto chips that other could wacth once the person died.
I was quite interesting wacthing this girl wacthing her moms life who had died when the girl was young.
$DO || ! $DO ; try(); > try: command not found
Let me get this straight, Vannevar Bush thought up the idea and George Bush already has my life on a hard drive?
Who would'a thought...
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
This is less of an idea or pipe dream and more of a emerging reality. I know that I have much of the last 3 years of my life already online. With a blog, Myspace, Facebook, and Google logging searches - I could argue that most things of significance from the last three years are reflected in one of those things.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I actually happen to believe that one's sanity critically depends on the ability to forget things... I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
That's a nice referrer link in your comment, Mr Cook.
I just created a list of every girl (okay, okay, both!) that I've ever hooked up with in my life and the dates in which it happened. It is still a work in progress as I rememeber details. If there are jpegs, I link them from the doc.
Then I appended every girl that I am currently talking to, thier interests and how I know them. With any relevant contact info. If I hook up with them, they will move into the hook-up list. Else, they will move into "I am just friends" list.
I need it to remember the good times, the screw-ups, and retain a log of my life that is easily searchable.
(I rue the day that I get married and my future wife might find it though.)
I'd like to shamelessly repost something I wrote a few months ago on another thread about a cell phone w/ 8GB of storage. It was a response to the people who were saying "why the hell would I need that much space there?":
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
As though the observation of life as an object is the same as living life as a subject.
This is not a breakthrough. If it is used as a body of data, rather than as entertainment, then it is just a bigger archaeological record, but it is not transformative in any way.
If it is used as entertainment (as it no doubt will be), then this is just the new "reality entertainment" mechanism with six billion channels of reality TV on all the time. If you thought biography, autobiography, and reality TV were bad, just wait for Totality Multimedia. In the most banal sense, given how much entertainment we already consume, you will finally get to spend you life watching other people watch TV. And then, you'll get to read about what they thought as they did it, and listen to the sound of them not speaking over the sound of the radio. It's so postmodern it's primitive.
So you can observe an entire recorded world in all its banality... Or you can turn toward the window and observe an entire world being recorded in all its banality. Life reduces to itself. Yay.
It does create an interesting paradox, though: with this much data, to absorb the entirety of another's life as object, you must indeed sacrifice a good percentage of your own life as subject (assuming that it would take something on the order of your natural life to view the entire record [if possible at all] of another's). Actually, that's not even very interesting, as it merely telescopes down to "if someone else wastes their life, and you are passively there for the entirety, contributing nothing, doing nothing, then you also waste yours."
Sort of goes without saying. I suppose there's a kind of performance art in being born, living, and dying only to watch someone else being born, living, and dying. But that's about it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Microsoft Research's Gordon Bell ... the ability to store one's entire life experiences on an accessible and easily searchable file.
Cringing at the possibility. He actually said "file" instead of database or "files". I'm imagining the Windoze and Outlook model - a single file, difficult to search or transfer, an EULA giving M$ permission to search and destroy "copyright violations" at will, zero security and it explodes at about 2.0 GB in size. Imagine:
You: "Computer, what did I do last night?"
computer: "Master?"
You: "My head is splitting, there's a stranger in my bed and I want to know what happened"
computer: "Just a moment. Just a moment"
You: WTF?
computer: "I'm sorry, you don't have rights to view that. They have been sold to America's dumbest moments."
You: "Erase Last Night, you piece of shit."
computer: "I can't do that Dave. It's already been uploaded, you will be sent the bandwith bill."
You: Smashing Computer. "Delete last night"
computer: "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"
computer: "Your seventh birthday has been erased and your brother is liquidated. Thank you."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1- First sex ....
2- Second sex
3- Third sex
4- Going to stripper club
Ect
I have a few close friends who I email almost daily. I tell these few friends the details of my life, both good and bad. I've saved all my emails since about 1995, so I have over 10 years of my history recorded in this manner.
A few months ago, I was going through some personal stuff about a relationship that had just ended. I wondered what the heck was I thinking when I decided to start dating this woman. So, I went back in my emails to the time when I started dating her and there were all my thoughts right there. I realized I was deluded when I started dating her, and knowing that made me feeel better for some reason. So, I guess going back in that fashion can have it's benefits, but I think recording absolutely everything is a bit much.
I'm sure a diary/journal would serve similar purposes, but for some reason, this works for me.
Have any of you seen the movie "the Final Cut" (staring Robin Williams)? It is based on this idea, where people have a chip in their head that records every moment of there life. Robin Williams job in the movie is as a 'cutter', the person who goes through the information once the person is dead and compiles the best memories to remember that person by. It tackles some of the ethical issues as well....but all up it is just a kinda creepy movie!
Hard work is just an accumulation of the easy things that you didn't do when you should have.
Then those damn kids can ask me for it. As for once I'm dead, I'm taking it to my grave, they can figure this crap out on their OWN!
You mad
Wish I had access to my own hard drive...
Lessee... Delete, delete, delete... Ack, run secure disk wipe on that one...
Ooo, lemme put this on YouTube!
Star Trek did it!
Support the FairTax
Does this mean I lose my life when the hard disk crashes?? I mean, I know I should back up regularly, but death seems kind of a harsh punishment for laziness.
If you can never forget, then you will always be able to relive that shame or guilt to the fullest.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
is about An insurance salesman/adjuster (Jim Carrey) discovers his entire life is actually a TV show
that sounds alot like this.
A: I have roughly the same number of memories as Oprah and Bill G -- and, for that matter, the homeless guy who lives under a bridge across the street from my house. Clearly, just having lots of memories has loose correlation with what defines a person. Hell, I probably remember a lot more, and with much higher quality, than Keith Richards does.
B: My mom is a weird Christian. It's her belief that when the bible talks about life after death, it doesn't mean a separate existence ("heaven") but in the memory people have of you, and if you did good, their memory of you will be good, and that's as close as anyone gets to heaven. By her definition, it's not your memory that defines you, but the memories of those who know you -- which I think correlates much better with defining a person (as per point A) than personal memories.
C: Not to get all postmodern here, but people's memories are unreliable: they color what they remember by what they expect to remember, what their society has conditioned them to regard as important. Their memories are contextual. The Chabris/Simons Gorilla Experiment is a beautiful demonstration of an extreme example of selective attention and the unreliability of memory.
Getting a (so-called) neutral-point-of-view copy of someone's life, a la Being John Malkovich, would remove a lot of subjectivity, in one way, but someone else viewing it would see entirely different things and come away with a completely separate experience. (Read about eye tracking in autism, for instance: non-autistic people pay attention to wholly different parts of pictures than autistic people do.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
You may be a victim of Personality counterfiting. The following experinces installed in this brain are not genuine:
Angsty Teenage Years.
First Romintic encounter.
Before you have new experinces you must contact Microsoft and get a Genuine life.
I don't bother to listen to it, other than to check occasionally whether or not the equipment is working. I don't have time. I also carry a 7 Mpixel Casio camera, for the occasional picture or video, but it's essentially impossible to use covertly, so there is a lot less data from this source.
WHY? Because I believe there's a significantly non-zero chance of a "positive" singularity, where we have access to strong, friendly AI. I'm going to feed all the data I've collected to an AI that I build or buy, and when I die, I'll feed it all the data collected from my frozen, vitrified brain using a destructive scan. If I'm extremely lucky, we'll have the technology to do uploading from living brains, or maybe to enhance a living brain with electronic interfaces. One way or another, I'm going to regain access to the data, either as a cyborg, or a pure AI.
The alternative is to lie moldering in the grave, forgotten and anonymous.
Here are a few tips to others who might consider doing this: 1. NEVER TELL ANYONE, not even loved ones. Nobody will behave normally if they think they are being recorded. 2. KEEP THE DATA SECURE. I prefer loop-AES, under Kubuntu Dapper. 3. BACK IT UP. Raid 6 with daily rsync to an offsite machine works for me. My data flow is about 10GB per month, uploaded. 4. Don't whack the iRiver, as it tends to reset and lose the recording, or lose clusters on the FAT16 file system. In order to get a full day of recording, load it in the morning with a freshly charged cell.
A quote from Jack Vance's "Languages of Pao" (1958): "On Breakness, status was based on a quality best described as the forcible imprinting of self upon the future."And it made just as much sense in the context:
"the ability to steal one's entire life experiences on an accessible and easily searchable file"
I don't want my life on a harddrive. I want a harddrive implanted in my head so that I think I've lived someone else's (presumably more exciting) life.
For instance, I want to know what it was like to go through life as Mr. T. (And don't give me no jibba-jabba that it can't be done neither. Those A-Team guys could build *anything!*)
this sounds like something from the movie "the cutter" which is pretty creepy!
Imagine this tech in hands of the terrorist leader.
Maybe it would be better to view this as a *very* detailed diary system.
The idea would probably be feasible (technologically and socially) if it was more of a Biographing tool, as in, the data files are stored in readable plain text. It would be so mind-numbingly boring to read the AUTODIARY4000, that nobody would, and the social problem is solved. The technology part is easy. It's freaking plain text. The challenge, actually, is the software. And wow, would that be one hell of a challenge. In fact, the challenge itself would be what causes severe psychosis in the programmers that attempt it.
Few enough people think my comments in online forums are interesting. Why would anyone care about my life? And suppose I were not to share it, then I would I keep it for myself for what purpose? Unplugging from current reality and engaging in nostalgia? And aren't some things just better off forgotten? I know there are probably a lot of dumb things I said/did in the past that I'd rather forget and hope everyone else does too. The Internet already does a fantastic job of bringing my stupid comments made years ago back into the present. I can only imagine was a lifestream would look like. Ugh.
I can just see it now. I'm back in time leaning in for my first kiss, and then I say "hang on baby, I need to strap on my headcam so I can remember this". Of course all that would be captured are several nose bumps and her comment that I'm using too much tongue. Like I said, stuff I'd rather forget...
Anyone ever seen Strange Days? Where the dude's got a while collection of disks of captured memories of his girlfriend that broke up with him? Yeah, there's a paradise...playing back immersive footage of some ex so often you can't let go and move on.
And lastly, to me, the whole idea of storing your life on a drive just smacks of Myspace style attention whoring gone stratospheric. And you think drunken party pics are bad...
-R
I could see some reasons why it would be useful. Suppose you made incremental backups of your mind -- for the same reason you make them of a filesystem: in case of damage.
Suppose you suffered some great psychological trauma, something so severe that it rendered you unable to function normally in society. Rather than being institutionalized, or living a reduced quality of life, you could restore your mental and psychological state to how it existed at the time of the backup.
I don't think you'd want to do it very often; it wouldn't be something you'd want to do every day, but I could see it having applications. The effect would be as if you had the memory 'snapshot' taken, and then suddenly woke up after some span of time, without remembering anything that took place in the middle. You'd probably have to have a lot of therapy to bring you to terms with whatever might have happened in the interim, but it would have to be less traumatic than experiencing it "in person."
Of course, this all depends on the assumption that you could "restore" a person's mind to a previous state using only some stored information, which I'm not sure is possible. I think it's entirely possible that there's a lot more hardware/software interaction than we're imagining; that when a person endures a certain amount of psychological trauma, there are actual subtle physiological changes in the brain which might prevent a restoration to a previous state. Who knows -- maybe the result after restoration would be so unstable that it wouldn't be worth doing. But if it did, and you had enough data storage capacity to allow anyone who wanted to to make regular "snapshots" to restore to, it could be hugely beneficial.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I can't believe that this is Slashdot and nobody has mentioned the possibilities of this system. Imagine a world where you could be "resurrected" from the sum total of your digital information. Who's to say that your you-ness can't be completely emulated by a future computer? We already have this capability-- our own brains. So what if, at the time of your physical death, we could grab the state of our minds and upload it to a computer and continue our existence digitally? I think that would be an incredibly awesome thing, and it may become possible at the singularity, should it occur. I would do it, I know. Sure, there are problems with that, but at the same time it would be incredibly cool to interact with real virtual people. Surely, with the total capacity of the Internet, even today, we could even store a person today if we had the technology to simulate it. Such a digital entity would be rather slow to communicate with at present speeds, but technology only improves with time.
It's something to think about, anyway, with net positive benefits rather than Slashdot cynacism.
I would also want the ability to delete specific memories. I have a few that I don't want.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
There would be a particularly positive impact revisiting significant childhood experiences to practitioners of meditation. Let me Explain, to an introspective person explicitly analyzing a thought often shines light on earlier experiences. Say I was emotional one day and did not know why. I would concentrate on my anger to traverse its subconscious nature into a conscious one. It is a thought driven process, so that once the anger is identified as resentment towards my Mom, I will understand to not longer get emotionally involved because the problem has been explicitly identified. But the problem persists until its root has been sought, and in many cases these types of problems can be traced back to the early years. Has it not been said that humans are most impressionable at the age of four? Perhaps that anger has links as deep as four. If it exists it must still exist in memory and it accessible with enough concentration, but with this advance in technology it's stored in both mind and matter. Revisiting these past experiences from video could shed light on our nature from new perspectives and would surely provide some insight to those with the willingness to search and discover.
I've recently started using a wiki to take notes on things I do. Not personal stuff, but how-to. When I have to look something up the second or third time, it goes into the wiki. If I have a cool idea for a project, I put it in the wiki. It's not much right now but's it's growing fast - and theoretically it contains an outline of everything I've learned lately. I'm amazed at the thought of how things would be different if I had started this 10 years ago though - keep in mind that everything that goes into the wiki gets reinforced because I come into contact with it on a regular basis.
Snow Crash's "gargoyles" are now real.
shut the fuck up you faggot. only a faggot would do something like this. a dirty, mac loving faggot. i hope you get the aids and die. i hope they can never "upload" your faggot brain. your happiness comes from taking it up the ass from dirty faggots like yourself. no one cares about you anyways. when you die the faggots down at the bath house will just find other faggots to suck their dicks.
...and all, but I can't help thinking that I have a wall full of DVDs and VHS tapes that I never watch.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
I have yet to see any substantial contribution by Gordon Bell to this field. I think the reason he is receiving all this press is because he's a famous name that's backed by Microsoft. Bell is a database expert, but the tough problems in this area aren't database problems.
If someone should get credit for pioneering work in this area, it's Steve Mann.
Some people seriously need to read more Science Fiction. In this particular case, go read "Accelerando" by Charles Stross. It covers much of the topics in this thread, and about a 1000 more. Dense reading, but OK if you've been reading Slashdot for a few years.
If humans may be viewed as the sum total of their memories we would be screwed. Are we?
I'd just watch the sex scenes over and over again
Countless tonnes of biomass respire while watching other peoples induced reality show lives, or fictional lives. Now they want to record and watch their own?
Maybe they want to sell other people lives?
Sounds like a stupid idea.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
human = sum total of all like-to-remember memories - like-to-forget memories
What better way to achieve this than the human brain!!!
You're right & you're right too! Referencing. Perhaps an engine that combines hot steam with supercold liquid air perhaps? Naw, Zero Emissions engines and free home electric are IMPOSSIBLE. Yeah, I agree. The Imitation Energy concept {"Real Energy" substitutes} is a bit much to swallow even for 21st Century Homo Superiors. Well, maybe in another 100 years people will stumble upon the lost newpath4 writings sealed from everyone's sight buried deep within the Department of Energy's classified independent inventor's Desktop Fusion Top Secret "Pyramid Archives". Along with the feared lightning electrical harnessing system long rumoured since 1989.
/. warming using, for gosh sakes, "Climate Engines".
And as Mankind draws its last gasping breaths of polluted air, in horror they may even find all they needed to do was sip a little Apple Cider Vinegar each day to clear the cobwebs, enabling them to solve global climate change
Wow. Isn't that a doozy? Didn't take a GENIUS to figure that. The Answer to Climate Problems {eventually to include Climate Control} would have to be a Climate Engine!
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
I tend to think the main effect would be to intesify the awareness of our own wickedness. Unless we could Tivo past all our petty acts of nastiness ...
If that's all we are, I think I'd rather be a goat ... or a rabbit.
All I can think of is that this would be a huge waste of resources. Nobody would ever want to watch more than a small fraction of the tape. And even if they did want to, it would be physically impossible without alot of skimming and skipping. If the idea is still attractive to you, I can only say get a life!
It is a rare movie indeed that I'd agree to seeing twice, or book that I would re-read; there's too much to see, read and do in life to start repeating old experiences.
Has anyone else noticed that they seem to building hard drives the same way they build everything else nowadays - this will never work because the hard drive will have a head crash in a year or less from being operated 24x7..unless they use a drive built 15 years ago or so..
.05 cents..we can't make any profit on making drives that LAST.."
"Oh what, you want fuseable links in that design..but that would cost an extra
As interesting as being able to flip back and observe an event agian and not just try to remember it, which I personaly would like to do for somethings in my life, I see the possibility of major problems, besides being able to use it to try to win an augument with someone it could be used as proof of your innocence of some crime, or used to convict you.
Would this fall under self incrimination or not?
Even more if anyone could be recording their entire life and you could be caught by anyone, whether they noticed you or not at the time, would this reduce people willnig to commit crimes? I mean if someone found out there was a crime committed in the park two weeks ago within an hour of being there, might they not go back to that day and watch the video to see if there is something or someone they weren't concious of at the time?
What happens when it becomes so common it is wondered what you are doing that you don't record everything, what do you have to hide? Must be guilty of something! Why are there 3 hours missing here and 4 there?The most fun I think would be to record my driving and catch all the jerks who don't know how to drive!!!
However in general I don't think I'd like my whole life recorded, it's along the lines "If you want to keep a secret DON'T tell ANYONE".
If closed the mind be, so then the mouth should follow.
would that make seagate or western digital guilty of murder? or just littering?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hopefully we could find the Paris Hilton channel and use FF and rewind functions
One word telescreen. Sure if it's voluntary it would be fine, but how long would it remain voluntary? Remember our (U.S. citizen here) president just gave himself the power to tap our phones at his own discretion with no oversight except for blanket authorization of the program. The idea of a life hard drive in our current society gives me nightmares thinking of the possibilities. Hint if the British had, had this technology in 1776 you'd be living in the British commonwealth of the Americas and Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, etc, would be know to history as terrorist traitors to the legitimate authority of the British state. Think hard before you jump for joy over this one.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
There was a Robin Williams movie on this topic (Final Cut or something similar.) They had a sight and sound implant that recorded everything, and couldn't be detected.
It wasn't a pretty world: every mistake, evil deed, etc, could be dredged up in living color when you died and a "Cutter" created a 45 minute highlights movie of your life for your funeral. Fortunately, most Cutters were highly "ethical" and only used the nice parts....