In 10 Years, Every Human Connected To the Internet Will Have a Timeline

Presto Vivace writes: O'Reilly Radar has an article about how ubiquitous tracking and collection of data will fundamentally change how we live. Quoting: "This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers — now, every interaction has a history. This isn’t just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isn’t about financial data, like Mint. It isn’t just your social graph or photo feed. It isn’t about commuting data like Waze or Maps. It’s about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it."

Comments

The folly of youth becomes the folly of life?

[dpilot]

Does this mean that the follies of your youth become held against you for your entire life? Even if we were somehow shielded until we're 18, youthful mistakes don't stop then. There has been quite a bit of study now that important developments in the brain continue into the mid 20's. Heck, since we often accept anecdotal fiction as evidence around /., think of Scrooge. He had a life-changing event relatively late in life.

At one extreme, we freeze everyone into the patterns of their youth. At the other, "I've changed, I've learned since then," becomes a mantra that absolves all responsibility. The difference here is that in the real world, people know you, your speech and actions, and how they all change with time, so they're at least equipped to make a decent judgement, even if that doesn't always happen. In non-meat-space those things aren't necessarily true, especially as so much incoming information is filtered to confirm one's current world-view.