Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (4 page)

But we don’t have to wait for the current crop of toddlers to grow up to see if this prediction will come true. The current crop of young adults is itself a convincing case for the inevitability of Total Recall as common practice.

The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are the cohort of Americans born approximately between 1982 and 2001. They came of age with Google, cell-phone cameras, file sharing, text messaging, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter (the online-community service where friends and families post frequent, 140-words-or-less “microblog” entries about whatever they happen to be doing or thinking at that moment). A few formed software companies and became millionaires in their twenties.

The seventy-million-plus Millennials are adept at multitasking. They listen to music, do homework, watch TV, and send instant messages—simultaneously. Nearly all own cell phones and computers. They snap pictures wherever they go. They socialize quite a lot online, chatting, trading music, and playing video games. Many stay in touch with their cliques so obsessively, they can’t bear to turn off their cell phones for a fifty-minute classroom session. If they misplace their smartphone, they feel as if they’ve lost their minds.

Of course, no group of millions of people is going to be monolithic. Studies show that not all Millennials are as tech-savvy as legend would have it, but even the unsavvy ones tend to be much less intimidated by technology they don’t understand than their parents would be. This generation makes far less distinction between their private and public lives than even slightly older generations. The Internet is littered with millions upon millions of their blog entries, their photo streams, their fan fiction, their chat-forum entries, their comments on all of these things, and of course their comments on comments. Scads of them post everything from their youthful hijinks to their intimate confessions on YouTube. Posted videos often elicit avalanches of video responses, many of them raw and unrehearsed, showing the responders’ unfiltered, unedited reactions—on a site that literally billions of people can view.

Those who put their lives up on the Web for others to view are called life bloggers (
blog
being short for “Web log”). I am a lifelog ger, not a life blogger. That is, I log my life into my e-memory. I may be old-fashioned, but it strikes me as foolish to publish too much, especially to an unrestricted audience. There’s too much risk and too little benefit. My lifelogging is personal and private. I do it for the very pragmatic value that it gives back to me. Unlike those making the effort to create blog entries and YouTube clips, most of my lifelogging is automatic. When I share, I do it cautiously, considering the trustworthiness of the individual recipients. Public publishing is only for what I am glad to have the world associate with me—forever. Once out on the Web it is easily copied, so you cannot “take it back ”—it has become part of the permanent cyber landscape (or landfill) forever. If you are one of those who really want to share everything with the world, go ahead, it is your right. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

While the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of digital life-chronicling, much of it is still ephemera, tossed-off throwaway documents like nineteenth-century theater billings and political pamphlets (which historians now drool over, by the way). Most of this chronicling is still haphazard: Parties, outings, and weekends are extensively digitally commemorated, but drives to school, study sessions, and dinner at the grandparents’ are not. I’ve observed people who are happy to record minutely from their lives, but they aren’t systematic about it. They record the things they think are important or cool or memorable at the time, but they don’t yet record everything they see, hear, do, send, receive, read, and compose.

This isn’t necessarily reticence on their part, because the software tools and hardware accompaniments for easy lifelogging aren’t readily available yet—not quite yet. Through the decade of the 2010s, user-friendly lifelogging applications will proliferate just like any other software niche, and a plethora of cheap devices for sensing, tracking, and compiling all kinds of information from all corners of life will pour steadily into the consumer-electronics market. As this happens, we will see lifelogging start to catch on with the Millennial generation, and older generations too.

COLLECTING E-MEMORIES, DISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE

It’s impossible to know exactly how long it will take for lifelogging to become common practice, but it’s almost a sure bet that it will do so within a decade. Abstaining from lifelogging will begin to seem more like avoiding the use of e-mail or cell phones, because so many advantages and conveniences will be foregone. Those who shun recording will be less empowered than those who embrace it.

You probably already spend a good deal of time each year filing away receipts, checkbooks, financial statements, photos, article clippings, and sentimental or souvenir items such as birthday cards and ticket stubs. You probably also take some time to label and annotate certain items to make them easier to later refind them and figure out what you kept them for.

Total Recall just means storing and annotating things digitally instead of physically. It will not be any more time-intensive; in fact it will probably be less time-intensive, and the amount of information will be orders of magnitude larger. Digital records take less time to file, take up almost no space, and are easy to search. Pioneers like me might be manually filing records by scanning or snapping photos of them, typing or speaking quick notes about items that need explanation, even composing longer stories as I create the record. But soon so much of that will be as automated as your bank account statement.

You won’t have to worry about forgetting someone’s name, face, or details of the conversations you have throughout each day. When you want to recall what someone said, you’ll be able to search for phrases or keywords. If the search brings up too many results, you’ll be able to narrow it down by other criteria: I remember it was said while I was on a trip to Atlanta. The person who said it was a woman, and I think she wore glasses. I’m sure it happened before I took my current job. Given enough criteria, even vague ones, a good search program will usually be able to find exactly what you are looking for.

Imagine the ability to scan the past with the ease that would put Google to shame. Imagine how it could affect therapy sessions, friendly wagers, court testimony, lovers’ spats (of course, metajudgments like “It’s the way he said it” or “You didn’t really mean it” will never go away). Imagine how easy it will be to prove that repairs were done, that a salesman went back on his word, or that the dog really did eat your homework. Think of how nice it would be to have recordings of childhood conversations with your best friend, or a complete audio library of the millions of priceless things your kids said when they were toddlers. What were those first baby words, really?

Just as important as the ability to search will be the ability to data-mine your e-memory archive, to find correlations and multidimensional patterns in your life experience. Your e-memory archive could give you insight into how you spend your time. Click a button and see a chart of how much exercise you have been doing in the last month, or year. Compare it to what you did when you were sixteen, or in the summer versus the winter. Or check how often you smile. Compare that to before you were married—or divorced. Total Recall can be a time-management gold mine, allowing you to define your goals or set standards for yourself and then track how they compare with your actual behavior. Maybe you are spending too much time managing your e-memories. Check it.

With the right software you will be able to mine your digital memory archive for patterns and trends that you could never uncover on your own—graphing, charting, sorting, cross-sectioning, and testing for hidden correlations among all your bits. Imagine if you could bring into a single database all the pictures you take, all the places you visit, all the routes you take, all your notes and annotations, all your e-mails, along with room temperatures, weather conditions, diet, activity, whom you met with, your meeting cancellations, what you read, when you worked, what TV shows you watched, your mood swings, your flashes of inspiration. What would happen if you could take that whole slurry of life-history fragments and run it all through a powerful pattern-detection program? What kinds of patterns might you find?

Digital memories can improve your health and extend your life. Equipped with new generations of personal sensing devices, you’ll be able to collect torrents of physiological data from yourself—alpha waves, dips in cortisol, temperature, pulse, sweating, and scores of other measures—in real time.

And the health benefits of Total Recall aren’t limited to those with known health risks. Whether it’s sticking to your exercise plan, watching your weight, battling insomnia, managing allergies, tracking down the causes of a recurring rash, gaining control of your stress and anxiety responses, or training your mind to focus better, your best and most often used tool is going to be an easily and totally recallable continuous physiological e-memory.

TOTAL RECALL

I hate to lose my memories. I want Total Recall.

This isn’t a pipe dream. I know that three streams of technology advancement—recording, storage, and sophisticated recall—have already launched the beginning of the Total Recall era. It is absolutely clear that by 2020 these streams of technology will have matured to give the complete Total Recall experience.

I don’t work on anything unless I see a practical payoff. I got started in this by wanting to get rid of all the paper in my life. Then I wanted better recall; then a better story to leave to my grandchildren. Soon I became aware of potential benefits for my health, my studies, and even a sense of psychological well-being from decluttering both my physical space and my brain. As time passes, I become more and more excited about the benefits of Total Recall.

As you read on about Total Recall, I’ll tell you more about my own story, and I’ll elaborate on the incredible gains that Total Recall will supply across so many areas of life. In the last section of the book, I’ll discuss how to put these ideas into practice, and explain how you can stop losing your mind and get started creating your own e-memories.

CHAPTER 2

MYLIFEBITS

My own quest for Total Recall began in 1998 while I was working as a researcher at Microsoft. I didn’t start out thinking of Total Recall. As usual, I was being pragmatic and looking for things to make my own life better. A colleague, Raj Reddy, asked me if he could digitize the books I had written and put them on the Web as part of his Million Books Project.

“Sure,” I told him, “Microsoft has a lot of lawyers. They should be able to get me out of any trouble that comes from copyrights.”

Seeing those books become digital felt good, and encouraged me to try some more scanning. I did the scanning myself just to see how to do it and whether it was interesting and useful. I scanned a pile of correspondence, patents, and around a hundred articles. I became even more upbeat, and set my sights on scanning all of my papers and notebooks. I saw it would declutter my office, and allow me to work from home or anywhere I happened to be. I could be an efficient, paperless teleworker.

Then I thought: Why stop there? With all those cheap terabytes of storage coming down the pipe, why not just keep
everything
? Not only books and papers and e-mails, but slide presentations, product brochures, health records, interviews, photos, songs, movies—all the information of my life.

It wasn’t as if no one had thought of this before. Bill Gates wrote in his 1995 book,
The Road Ahead,
“Someday we’ll be able to record everything we see and hear.” Clearly, that someday will come because we’ll be able to make practical use of all those e-memories. That someday is going to be in the middle of someone’s life. Why not mine? Why not now? But how? How could one person speed the arrival of the era of Total Recall? I became intrigued with the idea of keeping everything.

There is a strong social prejudice against this very simple idea. Keeping everything is like the eighth deadly sin. You’ll become a packrat, a horder, obsessed with your past. You shouldn’t look back. You need to clear out your attic and throw stuff away. And in a nondigital world, that kind of thinking made some sense. But in a digital world, with time and cost barriers melting away before our eyes, things have changed. Keeping everything doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time looking after masses of paper and stuff. Don’t throw it away, digitize it.

I especially wanted to rid myself of my filing cabinets and the countless banker boxes holding my old papers. Making them e-memories gave me the pleasure of getting rid of them—without really getting rid of them.

The idea is simple to state: “Record everything, keep everything.” But actually putting it into practice turned out to be a major project. Even though cheap terabytes were still some years off, I felt it was important to start immediately. When the day of the cheap terabyte arrived, I hoped to be able to give people insight into the logistics, costs, benefits, feasibility, and desirability of recording everything. And just what “everything” in your life might mean.

Building my own e-memory became a three-pronged effort. First, I had to make digital copies of everything from my past. Second, I had to start recording and storing everything I saw, heard, and did from that point forward. Then, third, I had to figure out how to organize the information in my digital corpus. This last prong was crucial. Just saving files willy-nilly into an e-memory is easy, just as throwing receipts into a drawer is easy; but come tax time, or if you ever need to find a specific subset of those receipts, you’ll rue your lack of filing discipline. So the big task would be to figure out what kind of software would be needed to make such a massive and miscellaneous collection of information useful.