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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?
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...
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
Such as entering a movie theater?
Record your life, so long as your life doesn't contain any copyrighted works.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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
Laugh while you can. Before long, turning off your Life Recorder will be considered a presumption of guilt.
The use of Life Recorders is only dangerous insofar as our society's ideology is broken. Whereas right now, there are so many loopholes, we can afford to believe stupid things ("it shall be illegal for an adult male to have penetrative sex with another adult male...") because there is so much room to hide from the law. Indeed, the deepest benefit of privacy is that it shields the lives of individuals from the ideologies of their neighbors.
By way of illustration, we all share (i.e. de-privatize) ourselves with people to the extent that they share our own ideology.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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.
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.
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.
Presumably you would encrypt your observations before storing them. Then it's just a matter of whether and under what circumstances the government can force you to reveal your passphrase.
My guess is that, faced with this novel situation, a judge might rule that if the police have probable cause to believe you were involved in a crime at a particular time, the court can demand your observations for that time period be decrypted, but aren't entitled to view your entire life. Failure to comply might keep you in jail for contempt of court.
A very strong argument could be made, though, that the 5th Amendment entitles us to refuse to disclose our passphrases. I confess I don't know the state of case law on this.
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").
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
or anything that might be embarrassing out of context
or anything that might clash with the feds current policy
or visiting the doctor
or talking to someone who might say something "inappropriate"
or looking at the wrong web page
or writing "I hate big brother" in your paper diary.
Or you could just use free software and encourage others to do the same before big brother can outlaw it along with the rest of your freedoms. Who on Earth is going to trust M$ with a life recorder?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
John Varley's "Steel Beach" looked at this from the other side. Soon, your household computer will be a reliable witness to every act of abuse committed against a spouse or child within your home. As a result, in the book both the law and their programming forbade computers from giving evidence against their owners. You can probably guess the eventual result.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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
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.