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