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MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life
Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.
To forget is human. To be human is important.
... Unless you're one of those perpetually smiling people only seen in corporate clip art, life tends to be full of more unpleasant, uncomfortable, and completely banal events than positive. I could not imagine anything worse than watching high school all over again. I would probably want to strangle myself for being such a horrible, awkward geek.
Really... How many moments of your life do you really want to relive? And wouldn't re-watching your most pleasant memories knowing what you know now dilute just how pleasant those memories were?
Sorry, but this is just journalistic hyperbole. It's not every moment of your life. If you were to store every moment of your life as HD video, it would consume far more than a TB. And that still leaves 3 other senses we haven't devised recorders or storage formats for. Not to mention high-resolution PET scans for internal state, brainwave records and who knows what else. This project is a cute scrapbook instead, not full-time, automagic, all-encompassing archiving of first-person experience. But yeah, we have a lot of storage and a person obsessed with scrapbooking minutiae could have a field-day.
Here are some possible problems... you can have the files subpeona'd for court cases. How do you secure them against someone who wants to know anything about you? Will your employer demand you submit the recordings each day?
I might be ok with it if the constitution was changed to make privacy an absolute right, and make the punishment for taking one of these files to be extremely severe.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Anyone who ever saw that icon on their Windows desktop that says "My Computer", and picture Bill Gates saying it, not themselves, should think about giving Microsoft that kind of complete access to their entire lives.
If the source were open, it were stored locally or encrypted at customer-selected third-party networked datacenters, this app could be wonderful, a lifesaver. But trust Microsoft with one's entire life? That sounds like putting it all in once place to be ruined or stolen.
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make install -not war
Some aspects of this will probably remain optional, but as storage gets smaller and ID programs gain steam, the two are bound to converge. Maybe you won't be able to see photos of various events throughout your life but your: GPS location, website history, purchase history, known associates, employment record, legal history, medical records, etc. will all be recorded. Ten years from now it will all fit in your federal ID that you have to carry in order to travel or make any purchases. Regardless of who wins the next election, it will happen.
We are all just people.
I hate it when life imitates art like this. This sounds eerily like the Robin William film "The Final Cut"
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."