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MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life

Posted by Zonk on from the now-we-need-a-hud-to-go-with-it dept.

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.

5 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Copyright Infringement by Jamu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What happens if he goes to watch a movie? If it were possible to store every moment of your life, and use it to augment your normal memory, would you need a change in the copyright laws?

    --
    Who ordered that?
  2. Wait till he gets his first subpoena by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wait till he gets his first subpoena. I'd love to see a court have to go through all of that just to not find anything of value.

  3. SciFi idea.... by Datamonstar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If a person using an app like this started seeing his future in it.

    --
    The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
  4. Re:Not really ... by cashdot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's no way you'll record everything about your life in 653 bytes/second. And that's ignoring that lossy compression isn't an option, since then you *aren't* recording *everything*, and ignoring your dreams, etc. On the other hand, I seriously doubt that our consciousness receives information at a higher rate than this. And what do you mean by recording everything anyway? All the things you pick up with your senses? Our perception already filters out some information, and is in that sense "lossy". Another "lossy compression" is going on between our senses and our brain. If you do not compare the possible recording rate with our perception rate, IMHO, this comparision is useless. For instance, what pixel resolution would you require to record "everything"?
  5. Re:Not really ... by Media+Tracker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper Computing machinery and intelligence, where he discusses the question of whether machines can think, and where he introduces the Turing Test, says (section 7):

    Estimates of the storage capacity of the brain vary from 10^10 to 10^15 binary digits. I incline to the lower values and believe that only a very small fraction is used for the higher types of thinking. Most of it is probably used for the retention of visual impressions. I should be surprised if more than 10^9 was required for [a computer to pass the Turing Test], at any rate against a blind man.

    10^10 bits is 1.25 gigabytes, 10^15 bits is 125 terabytes. The former seems ridiculously small to me too, the latter would equate to 82kB/second, based on your calculation. Now would that be enough, you think?

    I'm not even sure the question makes a lot of sense, actually. I don't picture the human memory as a discrete one (Turing discusses this too in his article, BTW), where information can be measured in terms of how many "storage units" it uses. I don't think a single memory, say the smell of my friend's uncle's basement when we were kids, could be extracted from my brain, taken out of any context, and measured to find out how many "bits" it uses.

    The problem would also be, obviously, that we don't know how to represent all this data in binary form. Which "format" do you use? AI researchers have been trying to build ontologies that cover all of knowledge, computational linguists try to build grammars that fully describe a language, and both goals are mostly unattained yet.

    Turing goes on to quote:

    The capacity of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, is 2 x 10^9

    So he estimates that the human brain holds less information than an encyclopedia. I find that hard to believe. The encyclopedia sure holds more facts than I'll ever remember, but how about habits, skills, things I could never fully describe into words, but that I undoubtedly hold in memory?

    It should also be kept in mind that in Turing's time there were no compilers, and programmers like him actually coded by manipulating bit sequences. So no wonder estimating the size of such large databases was hard for them.

    Anyway Turing's paper is a rather fascinating read, I highly recommend it to any programmer or CS student.