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

Re:6.5 Billion People

[Eightyford]

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?

No one is stopping you from reducing the population by one*! Or why don't you go hand out condoms or something instead of posting on slashdot.

*Just kidding, man. I'm sure you have a lot to live for.