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."

Comments

Memory != reality

[TheWoozle]

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.

and if

[rubycodez]

what if we could record your state of mind at the time too?

There goes my sanity

[poliopteragriseoapte]

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.

Re:Experiences != memories

[RingDev]

I think that's what this project would prove. We are not the sum of things we experience, we are the sum of things we believe to have experienced. Our persona is much more dependant on our interpretation of events that it is on the actual events themselves. Memories is also a bad choice as our interpretations at any given point may help to shape our persona, but in the future, we may have no memory of that interpretation.

Toss into that the whole nurture/nature argument, so genetic predisposition, physiological effects, and social expectations, and you might get closer to a "calculation" of who we are.

-Rick

Re:It Happened Once & It's Over

[buswolley]

C'mon guys. Are we still promoting behaviorism?? This is the age of cognitive science. The mind matters. We cannot treat the mind as a unchanging black box and simply map inputs to outputs. Inputs will have different consequences depending upon the state of mind/brain at that moment.

However, there is a strong connection between the memory recollection and the context of the encoding event. Usually, it is true that there is better memory performance when the context at encoding and retrieval of a memory are similar. We use cues gathered from contextual stimuli to help reconstruct the memories. To the point, while a video recording of our lives is not the same as recording the personal experience of that life, it can however help an individual recollect the event later.

Remember, for most cases it is true that recall is more difficult than recognition. Recall is retrieval of a memory without an external cue. Recognition is retrieval of a memory after being exposes to an external cue, like a face or a video. Recognition, according to dual process models of recognition is composed of two independent processes: Recollection and familiarity. (Yonelinas 2002). Ahh well, I digress.

A note: I am a research assistant at the Ghetti Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis.

Why?

[retro128]

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...

Re:It Happened Once & It's Over

[Lord_Dweomer]

but I wish their efforts were concentrated on something more helpful to society.

I REALLY wish people would stop saying things like this everytime a new scientific endeavor is underway. I mean, really, who the hell are you to judge what is more helpful to society? If you don't think people pursuing their OWN goals is helpful, then I HIGHLY recommend you watch James Burke's Connections series from the BBC because it will illustrate exactly how random human technological and societal development has been and what random quirks lead us to where we are now. So I applaud these guys. Who knows what future change this will inspire.