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Recording Your Entire Life
Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.
"The Final Cut" I think it was called?
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
You don't suspect that in a few years we won't have terabyte storage on our personal devices, do you? That would be really short sighted. If we're still here in 7 or 8 years, 1TB will probably be pretty ho-hum.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
the first time he "sees" a 14 year old dancing provocatively at a street fair or public park, or changes his kid's diapers, or goes to a bachelor party without getting signed 2257 documents from the stripper...
I wonder how he's changed his life based on the fact that it's being so thoroughly documented...
I used to make sure all my IM software logged all my chats by default - I saw it as a form of "recording my life" (I used to chat online a LOT). Especially in the event that something happened to me (some kind of fatal accident etc.) there would be some history or leftover "data" for family/friends to keep, I guess. Honestly if people had read the chats they would think so differently of me considering the things I discussed, but regardless I felt like I would want people to know either way. I imagine other people do this as well, although maybe not neccesarily with the same reasons in mind (no, I'm not hinting at anything).
Either he's asleep 23 hours a day or he spends every waking moment staring into space.
Best Windows Freeware
I can fill that in a day on Limewire.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
He was the feature in Fast Company a few issues ago. It was a really good read.
here it is although there are a lot of pictures and sidebars that are missing from the original print article.
Just think, if Anna Nicole had this, we wouldn't have to listen to all the media crap about who the father is. Just go to the tape. As an added bonus, we might have some good porn (unless it was that old guy married to Zsa Zsa).
Somebody go! Somebody go! God almighty, somebody go!
Big deal, if he just moved to Britain the job would be done for him.
pfft. I think I could top that on a weekend. Or maybe he just uses URLs.
- 2007.02.16:20.31.19.GMT
movie://holy-grail-dircut/chapters/3
food://cheetos
observe://fingers/wrongcolor/orange
use://pants/wipe.cgi
or maybe he just sits in a dark room. a stream of 0's would compress pretty well.
It's only a model.
I'm wondering how much a person would change their lifestyle, the things they do, watch, see, etc... if they were under this situation. Surely the person would have an understanding that the government could have a court order to seize all of this information and prosecute a person for everything they had ever done. Would they act the same under such circumstances?
A record like this almost needs to fall under the 5th amendment of non-self incrimination for a person to actually attempt this (which it does not of course).
It seems that it would either lead to a state of paranoia, or a person changing too much about their lives for it to be an accurate record of them.
I'd imagine that many people would change the people they associate with (who they wouldn't want to incriminate accidentally), the drugs they tried or saw, the women they talked to, the affairs they had, how they spent their money (and did their taxes!), the website they viewed, the books they read, the people they chatted with online or the porn they watched. Otherwise, they'd be nuts.
They would likely be arrested, dumped by their signifcant others, fired from their jobs, ridiculed by friends and family, etc..
I think the truth of it is that people (of all religions) need to realize that no one lives without fault/sin/whatever they call it, and be ready for the real brutal truth of all a person's dirty secrets.
I'm a musician/creative type and I know that I wouldn't want a hard record of everything that goes on around me. I'm sure that everyone else has seen/done things they wouldn't want expressed eventually to the entire world.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Immortality in 3 easy steps (patent pending):
1. Record all sensory information available to your brain from conception.
2. Grow a genetically identical clone of yourself.
3. Boot your clone from disk. If anything goes wonky, revert to a clean install.
Use appropriate DRM to prevent unlicensed copying.
Most people's lives just aren't that interesting. If someone wants to do this for their own amusement, like keeping a diary, that's cool. But I really have neither the time nor the inclination to read the blogs of people I personally know -- I usually make passing glances out of politeness -- never mind great swaths of their lives in digital form.
Considering he's to record all the 'sounds' he hears (radio, CDs) and 'sights' (including movies, TV, etc), we have more piracy on our hands!
And God forbid he likes kiddie porn!
Consciousness is directly related to how much you participate in your life, and how much you perceive you are able to participate in your life. Memory is a direct result of that. I can remember years of my life where I was given no choice, and I would run around aimlessly like a robot doing tasks a retarded monkey could figure out, day after day. Then too much automation took root and I completely fell apart. I can remember crying because I noticed the grain in a wooden surface for the first time in ages.
Memory depends on your perception then and now more than anything. The reason some are going headfirst into this kind of research is because the kids with technology spend all their time in meaningless environments doing meaningless things, they grew up that way. Games are meaningless, TV is meaningless, this text; it's pretty much meaningless, as is the news and slashdot. They're all virtual things with no value to us. They feel as though their life is meaningless because they do meaningless things all god damn day long, and at the end of the day, when they go home, and try to get meaning out of their lives, they find themselves unable to feel like they have meaning. Living a meaningless life leads to a meaningless past. Hence, the reason they want to record it.
What isn't meaningless? Hugs and kisses from beautiful women. Cranking up an engine you spent 4 weeks rebuilding and taking a drive down to a pizza place 100 miles away to celebrate. Waking up in the morning after damn dear dieing the last day and taking your first breath. Sitting infront of the computer and grabbing a flab of skin and noticing you've lost a lot of weight.
Those things have meaning, and some people may want to record them or take a piece with them to prove they were here and they did this. Some of us have meaningfull lives that go places, and for us, there's no point to record it all; we've already got what we want right here, right now and the memories can be relegated to stories you tell buddies in bars at 2 am. For the rest of us, memories of the deceased are enough to get us through the day.
It's a technology for a sick culture.
I'll love to do it. Unfortunately I also know that all governments would love to implement some law that gives them instant access to that data wherever they want. By cherry picking information in so much data you can probably accuse anyone of whatever you want just by picking events without putting them in context.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
This will be highly inadvisable until such time as we are all forced to have them. At which point it will be illegal for your lawyer to advise you not to have one.
At the point at which they become ubiquitous, you will either have a mass boycott of copyright (because people will not be permitted to record that part of their life) or a mass revolt against it causing it to be stricken down because people want to be able to record everything they see.
I think that is only reasonable of course; why should only those with eidetic recall be permitted to remember every detail of a movie?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder how those around him have been forced to change their lives based on the fact that they're being so thoroughly documented.
Personally, the idea of this creeps me out. I mean, if you want to completely destroy your own privacy, I guess that's okay, but if you want to damage the my privacy by recording everything I do in your presence, then that's different.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Like most of you folks, I started a little blog to document my family and my life. It makes for a pretty darn good memory jogger. I sheepishly used it to remember my daughter's birthday, my wife's cell phone number, and all manner of timeline issues.
For the most part, I don't care about remembering everything. I want to remember the good stuff, the funny stuff, and the important stuff. The key to memory is having a good editor.
i think the real question is who's going to bother watching it?
perhaps in the future you could record your entire life, watiching someone else's life, who's been watching someone else's life on a mac
hmmm
I wonder how many Gb would be taken up just taking a piss
and how well it would compress with x264 over a period of several years
If people spend craploads of money hiring people and equipment to record the most significant moments of their lives and then shelve them never to be viewed again...what the hell is the point of recording all the insignificant moments? Oh, yes, I really must relive that lunchtime subway ride back in August.
But why do you think that your descendants will care? How much of your ancestors' lives would you be willing to sit through? Would you give up "American Idol" to sit through your great-grandfather's off-key redition of "A Bicycle Built For Two"?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I'm not even talking about criminal behavior. US law now makes it a crime to _record_ all types of otherwise perfectly NORMAL human behavior under the guise of "protecting the children." You could be a freaking saint but unless you spent your life alone in a room (and were castrated) you would inevitably find yourself "seeing" things the nanny state wants to protect us from. Thanks to the latest bit of wonder from the 11th circuit court, you couldn't even walk the street during Mardi Gras without violating 18 USC2257.
How will he safety store these terrabytes?
Sounds like a case when the making of will be more interesting than the actual movie.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
What hubris. What self-aggrandizement! What a collosal waste of good disk space! What ego!
Wait, buy me some Seagate stock!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
They should have done this in 1984.
-Maurice
FixingTheWeb.com Helping to keep the bad guys out...
I guess I must be a very busy bee with my 50 Gb per month in new data. And thats no video, pictures nor spam. I guess I am not living on this planet?
Will I be able to use google on the collected data to find my car keys in the morning? If so, sign me up now.
twitter, do you sometimes feel you're taking this heroic struggle against "M$" a little too far? Inserting yourself into threads with pointless non-sequiturs like these?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
This would be great. My computer remembers my life for me, so that I don't have to.
There's an interesting video on youtube of a guy that has apparently taken a photo of himself every day for six days, and has collaged it all together.
You're right. I didn't mean to implicate that everyone is actually a bad person/criminal, and your example is perfectly right of how the system might abuse someone who documented too much.
I'd hate to be arrested after being on stage (recording everything I saw) and some 17 year old girl flashed her tits at the stage. Opps, then i'd be slammed for recording child porn. And you're right. Walk down the street at Mardi Gras and opps... tits again. Maybe underage? No 2257 documentation? Slammer.
God forbid I saw or smoked some weed, or left a beer bottle sitting somewhere backstage that someone that was 20 got ahold of.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
To me, this project is pretty interesting, let alone impressive that the guy manages to stay committed to working at it for 9 years.
But this idea that everyone will be doing this seems pretty stupid to me. If we recorded everything we did, without revolutionary advancements in search or data mining technology (which the article recognizes), that information would be worthless for most cases with the exception of things for which you know an exact date or time. So you want to know what you did Jan 4, 2003, no problem. Want to know the last time you saw a kid flying a kite in the park? Problem, unless you want to search the video of each time you were in the park. Want to remember that song that you liked that was playing when you were driving with your brother in the car, but can't remember when it happened? Problem unless you want to replay all the audio of you two in the car. The article discusses using metadata to "tag" events, but this is cumbersome with currect technology (as the article also recognizes). Most "tags" would need to be manually added, which would still be a problem even if voice recognition software made it easier to add the tags. We could solve the problem of remembering parts of conversations if voice recognition software converted all speech into a searchable form, but we aren't quite at that level yet.
FTA: An ordinary notebook PC can run a database that is more powerful and almost 100 times as large as that of a major bank of the 1980s. An inexpensive cell phone can surf the Web, play videos and even understand some speech.
Yeah, and a decade before that in 1976, the CRAY-1 was impressive. Sorry if beating an 80s computer doesn't allay my feelings that our computers can't handle the massive amount of data that the article discusses.
The article talks about logging health information that would allow the doctor to see early warning signs of things like heart attacks. I'm not going to preted to know all of the warning signs for heart attacks, but it seems to me that many of them are only valid when certain other factors are present as well. For example, if your heart rate is high, its probably not a warning sign if you are also running a marathon. FTA: "Sensors can also log the three billion or so heartbeats in a person's lifetime, along with other physiological indicators". Yeah, have fun running the queries to search through the roughly 40 million heartbeats you have each year while comparing that to the other important factors that determine heart attacks, and then do it again for other diseases.
I'm sure there are a ton of great uses for this technology. I just don't think that we are anywhere near diong all of the things the article wants, and even if we were, it would end up making more work for people. With that said, consider how this might affect our brains. When I was young, I had my closest friends' phone numbers memorized, along as a few of their addresses. Once I got a cell phone, I slowly forgot every number I knew. Up until a year a year ago, my mom, who just got a cell phone 3 years ago, could remember the number of the first house she lived in. As we develop technology that remembers things for us, what happens to our ability to remember?
In fact, everything has only and exactly the meaning you give it, and for you, no other meaning is possible. You chose to give certain situations in your life meaning, and you chose to say that others had no meaning. That was your choice. But it is not entirely up to you, your choices are never made as freely as you think. As a child you had little choice but to accept the meaning-templates that society provided you. You can choose to move on and redefine your templates, but that is a hard thing, and most never do it.
I'm glad you've found more meaning in your life, though. That is always a good thing. Just don't shut out those "meaningless" parts, they may have more meaning than you thought at the time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's not such a bad thing, really. Navel-gazing is, in some ways, what differentiates humans from all other species. Your dog or your cat never asks where it came from -- or where it's going, for that matter.
The concept isn't that much different from those early web pages, where you posted pictures of your kids as though it was the most amazing thing ever. Now, there's MySpace, which just makes it easier to put your life online. Why not take it one step further, and put your entire existential experience online?
Now, whether your internal dialog about your origins and destinations holds any interest for the rest of humanity... I guess the worst that can happen is that your digitally recorded existance is erased in favor of the latest 3D porn video, but at least you tried.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
And will be used against you in a court of law. You are going to jail.
.
.
Beer! It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Hey, I'm already doing this. My entire life is being recorded, audio, visual, olfactory, the works. And the boring bits are getting edited out automatically, leaving all the interesting and eventful stuff. I can play it back anytime too, although I'm the only one that can view it unfortunately. I've got some accessories that can help with capturing and sharing any important bits with others though. Not much point sharing the dull boring rest of it with others anyway.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Here is where you can get more geeky information about the SenseCam that Bell uses. It senses body heat and changes in light level to take pictures which are considered "interesting".
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I don't know about you guys but every time there was some mysterious assassin in a movie there were never any photographs of him. I always envied that.
I do not believe that this is healthy. All that is known so far is that the different filtering processes of memorizing things in the different memories are important to your psychological balance. In the moment when you will be able to access without any difference the worst times in your life an as well as the best I would predict a whole new class of psychological disorders, becaus this changes the interpretation of yourself completely. One would be optimistic and say that you can get more objective about your own faults, but I doubt that this will be good. Moreover it will change human interaction. I personally find it agressive that when i am calling for support to some company (call-center) the voice in the beginning tell me that the call may be recorded and I have no possibility to decline. The funny thing is that e.g. the bad support experience there would be even impossible to prove, because each person on its own acted somwhow right, nevertheless the point is missed!
When I showed up in Washington for my job, I had lunch with the big boss, who was the former chief of staff to the US VP. Big big cheese in DC. The #2 to the #2. I still had on the west-coast, happy-go-friendly naiveté slathered thick.
... yup, in the book.
It was the first week, and the first time the big boss took some interest in me. Lunch was expensive - he paid.
We chatted, dug in. He said a connection I needed to remember and follow up with.
I pulled out 'my book', the latest leather bound notebook I had kept religiously throughout my graduate life and after. It was just the latest book, like the 4 others before it that I had filled and put on the shelf. At any meeting - the date at the top, notes in delicate print, people, emails, good points - all the things I needed to recall later. Two years later, if I needed the name of that person in the 5th seat from the right from BigCo, Inc.,
The boss's eyes widened, his head tilted -- he said, bluntly: "What's that?"
"Oh, I keep a book with notes."
"Oh" he said, pausing, "we don't do that here."
There was then an even longer, more awkward pause. I scrunched my brow furiously trying not to look too stupid. My eyes darted. "Huh?" I'm thinking, like "What? Write notes in a restaurant?"
"That is a subpoena waiting to happen", he continued. We then talked at length about how things happen in the real world. That was 4 years ago. I learned a lot from him. I don't keep books any more...
Since then I've quit a few times, been fired a few times, sued, been through 2 trials, won one, lost one, hired and fired a bunch of people, and now I'm running a startup. Fun times.
Long story short: IF I ever did record anything, I'd certainly never tell anyone that I had it. There is simply too much risk of it being used against me in the current litigation-crazy world, both from other people and from the state.
the signal (useful info) to noise (useless noise) will be huge.
with that much actually EXTRANEOUS data (how many hours
of staring at the bathroom wall do you really want to store??),
discarding what is useless will be a huge task -- because editing
takes lots of time -- thus...
'As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful
as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a
vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value
than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over
for yourself.' (Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena v2)
3cents
j
The problem isn't the technology - it's you. I own a cell phone, and I haven't forgotten any of the numbers I have memorized. On the basis that since I have them memorized, there was/is no point in entering them into the fun. It's not the technology - it's your own laziness.
Would it be better with Voice Recognition?
..." link voice 1 or Voice 2 with data set X.
:P
If "name is
I've thought about doing this for a while, with voip and a portable device (Think home computer linking to your phone line) it would be pretty good. It could even keep a 64kpbs buffer of a few hours... then you could erase it just before you leave
You're right, there isn't much of a point in entering numbers into a fun (not meant to be an insult, just kinda funny...).
Ok, my example was running on the assumption that you use your cell phone to store your numbers. For the purpose of that example, if you don't store numbers in your cell phone, the phone isn't any different from phones fifty years ago. Cell phones store your numbers primarily so you don't have to remember them, or so you can get them if you don't remember, which is similar to the technology described in the article but on a much smaller scale.
Also, I don't think that I'm being lazy by using my phone's capabilities. I can argue that you are the one who is being lazy by not taking the time to enter the numbers into your phone just as easily as it can be argued that I'm lazy for not remembering them.
I can't quite figure out why these people think that anybody cares about their lives.
Leave it to a bunch of geeks to think they've captured it all with video and audio only. Call me when you can record smell, taste and touch and all those un-named body sensations that are going on all the time.
That's my life, slowed down .975%.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
If it takes a whole lifetime to record, it will take a whole lifetime to watch, and you wouldn't be able to start watching until you were old enough to understand what was happening anyway. He'd better hope he dies very young so that people have enough time to see the whole thing.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
Would it be better with Voice Recognition?
I'm a little confused, are you saying you think it would or wouldn't be better with voice recognition? Not that I disagree with you that it could be done, but I still think it would be a lot of work to do it that way. You'd still have to take them time to manually (I'm considering voice to be manual as well as typing, as opposed to automatic which could accomplished with something like recognizing voice patterns and linking them together in this case) tag information. Unless the software could determine that voice 1 is John Smith, I don't think voice recognition would help much. Of course, it would be very helpful to have voice recognition software that could save a conversation in some searchable form. I'm not sure if that was what you were talking about or if you were referring to another situation from my post.
That is the system of immortality used in the novel "Down and out in the magic kingdom".
Its published for free on the net, i saw a review on slashdot at some point though i can't find it anymore. Its actually a very good read http://www.craphound.com/down/
Would it be possible to skip the commercials of my life this way?
I would think that linking voices to people would be considerably easier than determining which words are spoken, though I might be wrong.
Tag information could be done with GPS, clock or anything.
Besides I'd rather know what people said than where or when they said it.
As far as making conversations searchable that's exactly what I meant.
My ICQ logs contain all the phone #'s I forgot to put in my cell phone...
Eventually everything will be but dust. But we are but human and we want to give context to our lives.
:P)
The more you tighten your grip trying to hold everything, the more that will slip through your fingers. (yes I've paraphrased a starwars quote, so sue me
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
This is impressive from a purely technological perspective ... but frankly, my own life just isn't that interesting, even to me, and there's still a lot of it that I'm trying very hard to forget.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Having read all the comments so far i do not think ANYONE got the point of this tech.
Firstly this is preliminary work. There was no mention of possible products in the near future, no mention of this being a finished tech or of it being anything other than an experiment.
Secondly this would be amazing combined with other technologies we are going to achieve in the near future. (IMHO. Assuming we don't all drown/fry/bake first) Direct connections to the brain, neural control over devices, sensory overlays, direct sensory inputs (i.e. recording what you hear rather than what a microphone attached to you hears) and implanted digital storage to name just a few.
Thirdly actual self choice of what to keep is not explored. Maybe if you had a 1 week buffer for video/audio after which anything you hadn't tagged as important gets deleted. This is effectively how your brain functions. It is also how most people manage their mail/emails/data anyway. What is making everyone here think that people wont bother doing the same with this tech? When your sitting at home at night or on the bus thinking about stuff thats been happening recently would you not be accessing your recordings of these events? Why would you not at least have a system that ranks "most viewed" or "not ever viewed" memories, if not just tagging stuff you want to keep yourself?
Also, if the device that does all this recording is to be active all the time it would have to be an implant of some kind to gain widespread use. We have had pens and paper for a LONG time but it is not used to note down important information because people can't be bothered carrying it around everywhere they go.
As to the legal issue, this is effectively a non issue as you would not keep information regarding crimes you have committed unless you are stupid. Stupid criminals deserve to go to jail. Simple. It is like murderers who keep vast collections of evidence in their house or corporate thieves who keep the receipts. Destroy the evidence...duh.
In summary this is amazing research and will be the future of the human races memory. Please think things through before you slam them
One easy indicator would be phase jitter. Contrary to what you might expect, the more regular a heartbeat is the more chance there is of heart failure. Store a standard deviation per day, search for trends: pretty small and manageable data handling problem.
Yes, Ana has the longest running cam now that JenniCam is defunct. Ana's pregnant right now and we've had a lot of discussions about how having a baby is going to affect her life on cam. I find it interesting to see how it's totally a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. She posted about her struggle with deciding to keep the baby, and no matter what she does, there will be people critiquing her choices with respect to parenting. I hope the world is a little saner by the time I'm raising a child online.
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This area is my passion, so it's great to see it getting some attention on /. :)
I've been doing some brainstorming to nail down the "why"s of recording and sharing one's life online. Here's a whiteboard shot in raw brainstorm form if anyone's interested.
I already find so many bits of usefulness from even the limited recording/sharing that I have done for all these years. More efficient communication with others (ie. going out to meet a friend and they can check the cams to see exactly what time I leave), augmented memory, remote access to personal attributes (mood, workload, etc. for tying in with home automation), and a more accurate distribution of self online.
I think as blogs become something that even your grandmother uses, there will be a push for an even more authentic representation of self over the internet.
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Yeah, this is one of the biggest challenges this area faces -- making use of the mountains of information that it creates. Some things are already being done, such as analysis of background noise to determine the context of an audio recording, not to mention GPS and timestamps. But I think wider ranging and social methods will start being used, such as user tagging and AI in searching for information to add context.
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First, I assume your blog is secure, if it wasn't you should have corrected that by now. Second, a whole lot of you people seem to be missing one of the fundamental benefits! Being able to say "I told you so" and prove it. That would apply to auto insurance, malpractice, shoddy customer service and arguments with your oh so significant other.
Here is how it should work:
I wear glasses (used to have contacts) and I can easily imagine a pair of glasses where the spring in them is just a little longer and one side includes a microphone and the other side has a camera. I'm not sure about powering the thing but if you could get it broadcasting wirelessly (yes heavily encrypted) to my cell phone which in turn uploads periodically to my glife (google's next product) then you'd be able to have an audio/visual recording of practically everything I see/say/hear.
All the video/audio is stored temporarily on my cell where I can also set the cease broadcast, cease recording or cease upload options. It is pretty handy to control it from there, but it also has the "instant replay" option for whatever storage capacity I can afford/prefer worth of time. I imagine that at home I'd put it on cease upload but at work and driving I'd be on broadcast/record/upload constantly. I imagine Progressive or Allstate would offer a "certified driver" program and I would enable the same sort of technology in my car but on a simulcast to trusted third party option for a hefty discount. I'd certainly opt for the "dump last hour of data to police on death" and the "call the frigging ambulance if you crash" options.
The next thing would be a password to access archives beyond my cell phone replay option. I would memorize 24 hour, 30 day, 90 day, 1 yr and 7 yr passwords which would lock the archive for those periods of times if I used them. You could set your archive with whatever default lock period you like and nobody would be able to tell if you deliberately locked it or not. Some people would doubtless like to record their lives but don't want them pried into until a statute of limitations would apply so you could always plausibly say that you were one of those people (or that you only know the 7 yr lock password if you're a doctor, lawyer etc and then rely on third parties, possibly pairs of other people.) It would be trivial to change the lock/archive periods so that what you do at work is locked for 7 years, driving for 24 and home not at all and not stored at all when you're feeling private.
Heck, the politician who has the longest period on record of "share with third party ethics auditors" would be a shoo-in for office. Call the other guy a liar and stand on your "Really moral and honest guy" rating if you can get it. If not, then maybe somebody who can will run.... that or a talented hacker.
I cannot imagine how many arguments I wish I could have solved with the "Wait, lets check out an instant replay" option. I can go a step further and say that it would doubtless have my wife agreeing with me far more often about what was said. She insists on debating what she or I said, and while I'm sure she is occassionally right, I am really good at that sort of thing. On the other hand I imagine that I would almost never argue with her about what she told me previously. The thing is that both of us know that the other person is better at some types of recall, but there is no way to tell how often or how much better quantitively. Even if we knew the likelyhood was that we'd be wrong, we could "check the replay" if we thought this might be the time we were the one who was right.
I would never need to tell people in the service industry they suck again, if they suck then I can post the entire episode on youtube! Yes, I mean you Sprint, Wafflehouse and York Tire!
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I've been recording everything in my life for the past 23 years. The storage requirements aren't too bad: I'm able to carry it all around with me with room to spare. Acquisition and retrieval are the real issues, as there is a lot of metadata to sort through, and not everything encodes well. For instance, there is a huge chunk at the beginning that is practically illegible, as well as a long section in the teens that seems to be recorded as a bunch of flesh-colored RLE bitmaps, followed by a few years where every entry is punctuated by the string "GU1INNE55 W4Z H3R3". I also get similar errors when I try running Scotch 2.1; I contacted the author, but they just said it "works as intended".
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Yes, I definitely agree that voice recognition could make things easier to search. I also think that that is one of the more feasible undeveloped technologies required in the article. I think that, one way or another, there are so many people working on voice recognition, that it is just a matter of time (probably not that long anymore) before it really works well. Things like image recognition, where it needs to determine that a kite is in the picture, is considerably harder, but that's really not relevant to what you were saying. As for determining who was talking, I really don't know either if it would be easy to determine who is talking, assuming that the person has talked before and has been labelled.
Tagging via GPS or time and date is definitely easy, but provides little help if you don't know the time or location of the thing you are searching for. What if you got really angry while talking about something a week ago and want to remember why... tagging would be necessary unless somehow your mood could be monitored. It could also be difficult to find the point where the person you were talking to got angry. There are other examples, but the tagging issue really isn't important for conversations if we can search them. Tagging is much more relevant for events that happen around you or for images that you see. Without tagging these images or the use of image recognition, it would be extremely difficult to find events where you don't know the time and place. Consider the billboard example in my original post. Also, as we add these new technologies and information, the amount of data increases. Maybe it's just because I'm a CS major and taking a class on algorithms and their running times right now, but I really think that a lot of things you would want to know would be difficult to locate.
Would you consider it tragic or ironic to discover that our iEchelon DSLAM monitoring devices run Linux?
I would not expect less. Big Brother wants to own his systems too. Free means free for any purpose, even a gross misuse of taxes like wire tapping by government officials. Risking vendor flaws and backdoors in such a situation would be extremely irresponsible.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I thought the US government was already doing this
Aren't Microsoft employees required to delete their email archives every 30 days?
This is a very interesting concept that I was recently exposed to as part of the "Death Care" Industry. I don't mean interesting in one man recording his own life, but what is recorded for you when you are gone by your family/friends/loved ones. I recently had my Grandfather pass away and I was amazed at the technology penetrating funeral homes. One of the options our family was presented with was posting a "living tribute" or something online. That is our family could add content, post pictures, pick music, etc as part of a permanent tribute, not just an obituary.
Interesting idea, although we decided to pass. I wonder if something like this will take off and people will start going online to memorialize their loved ones, as opposed of going out to the cemetery. The Funeral Director said it was a new site (timelessmemories.com I think) and that it was something that only a smaller percentage of people were doing, but he thought it would grow and said he had gotten some really positive feedback so far.
Guess everything is going digital, now death.
Deploying such systems does raise ethical and quality-of-life issues but these will have to be addressed by the larger society (not the computer scientists).
Why take great swaths of my life to watch recordings of great swaths of someone else's life? I only have so much time. Sum it up, Bell. There are almost seven billion other people to go through, and they're dying --and being born-- like hotcakes.
I've been interested in a version of this for a while. Imo an audio/video stream really isnt what I'm interested in. It's an audio stream run thru a speach-to-text app stored as text for searching. Course, this relies on better speach-to-text than we've got at the moment, and really doesnt work well with others due to limitations on the mic especially in a crouded area... tho this could be worked around if both people had a similar device & could share time segments for colation.
You might be able to run a version of this now, run the audio thru a speach-to-text app, but keep them for a few years while apps like that improve. This may allow for an early adoption but end with a better result once better software's there to interpret it.
Now, ontop of this, encryption & the ability to securely delete files would need to be built in, I agree with many privacy concerns echoed here(tho an audio stream would be less damaging than audio/visual, and a text log less damaging yet). Ontop of that, if you went to a multi-device version of this, priavcy concerns would be even larger because somehow there's sharing going on here, and assuming you don't want very tedious manual swapping, there's going to be some communication between devices going on here which opens them up for attacks to a degree.
Still, I think the concept is very intriguing & worth considering. I can't count how many times I've wanted to be able to remeber the exact wording used in some situation, whether it was an assignment in school, or a point in an argument. Seems like a text log like this would be a lot more useful though simply because it's searchable, you dont have to know the timestamp of a particular incident to be able to pull it up quickly.
Deploying such systems does raise ethical and quality-of-life issues but these will have to be addressed by the larger society (not the computer scientists).
First off, you're definitely right here. I was trying to avoid looking at those issues so I just focused on the technical aspects, but that isn't to say that they aren't important.
These researchers realize that the hardware (memory, sensors) will keep advancing at a steady pace.
No disagreement from me there. I think that the hardware requirements will be feasible in the near future. The ability to analyze that data is what I think is lacking. I am sure that the sales records from a large supermarket chain would look meaningless if a human should try to analyze it, but we have algorithms that do spit out useful information.
Again, correct. I've written a program that takes a small number of gene sequences (
With all that said, if the point of this project is just to advance the technology, then I missed the point. From the article, they seemed to be claiming that this stuff is in the near future, which is really hard for me to believe. Also, I could definitely be wrong on all of this. Ya never know what might happen. Someone could develop software that allows a computer to become aware and more intelligent than a human, or someone else find a way to determine and prove the absolute limit of a computer's computational power. I think we will be more likely to see the techs in the article than those last two hypotheticals, but we can't know. I just find this tech to be before its time on the computational side.
I. A cutter cannot sell or give away Zoë footage.
II. A cutter cannot have a Zoë implant.
III. A cutter cannot mix Zoë footage for a rememory.
The Admin and the Engineer
What's your criteria for meaningfulness vs. meaninglessness? It seems like you're suggesting it comes down to a combination of hard work (building a car, losing weight) or "genuinely" good times (hanging out with a woman), but it's not clear on what basis we can say that certain kinds of hard work (the car, the weight) are meaningful and others are not (writing a reply on /., beating a video game). Is it just that you think that anything revolving around using a computer is too "unnatural" or too easy to be meaningful? Or are physical activities inherently more meaningful than other ones?
Would you say that animals live meaningful lives or meaningless lives? Most of the ancients thought that animals had meaningless lives, since animals can't think, which they held to be the highest activity, but your examples seem to suggest that since you think physical activities like hard work and flirting (step one to reproduction) are meaningful, animals can also lead meaningful lives by living naturally or whatever.
I'm really curious about your criteria here, since from a scientific/materialistic/evolutionary perspective, humans are just a type of animal, so nothing human can do could ever be "unnatural," just natural in a different way, much as the natural actions of a chimp are different from the natural actions of a bacteria. Thus, I find naturalness as a gauge of meaningfulness to be problematic, since there is no way to tell the natural from the unnatural except to suppose that the human animal shouldn't have changed its environment as it has.
It's all very well storing 1.1GB of my life, however you are going to need a monster amount of bandwidth to play the whole thing back to me in the time it takes a bus to hit me.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Won't this just be recordings of Gordon Bell recording Gordon Bell?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I think the truth of it is that people (of all religions) need to realize that no one lives without fault/sin/whatever they call it, and be ready for the real brutal truth of all a person's dirty secrets.
There is in fact one religion that realizes that no one lives without sin. That tells people that they can't perfect themselves. That they need forgiveness. That they can't please God with their own actions.
Just sayin.
I remember this article the first time around -- when it was in Fast Company. I bet Gordon Bell does, too.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
Considering the possible value of some of the footage in even the most mundane life...anything less than miniDV would be a shame.
In order to get the best possible quality from the footage it should be stored in AVI form.
13GB/hr * 24hrs = 312GB/day
312GB/day * 365days = 113,880GB/year
Now you can obviously gamble and get away with less storage in the hopes that you will never need to record anything worth seeing.
Hedgehog
I suspect 99% of human history was very communal. In a smallish tribe of 15-100 people its not hard to watch everyone all the time and know everything about everybody. My only minor experience is long backcountry trips. You know who is bonking who and when, when people are sleeping, eating, bathroom, etc. You get used to it.
The eastern religions have a term for recording of everything called the Ashkantic record. Mystic adepts of the highest degree can supposedly view these records. Supposedly by the time you released this level you've purged yourself of all your bad emotions and wouldnt use it to blackmail someone else. The purpose is to gain absolute understanding of all your lives; and to help others who are still "asleep".
Supposedly you "download yourself" into some advanced flash memory and live forever. He explored associated plots like like a thousand times faster than the meat world, and so on.
Personally I wouldn't mind having the cool eyepiece permanently hardwired to my brain for instant recall and transmission to the others of my collective.
What transforms it into laziness on your part is when you start to blame to technology for your own failing - I.E. loss of memory.