Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (2 page)

We chose not to delve into technical detail in the main text. For those who would like to know more about the computer engineering behind Total Recall, we refer you to the Annotated References and Resources section at the end of this book, and our Web site,
www.totalrecallbook.com
.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THE VISION

I’m losing my mind.

Not the Gordon-needs-a-high-priced-psychiatrist kind of losing one’s mind, although my teenage granddaughter may disagree. Instead, each day that passes I forget more and remember less. I don’t have Alzheimer’s or even brain damage. I’m just aging.

Yes, each day I’m losing a little bit more of my mind. By the way, so are you.

What if you could overcome this fate? What if you never had to forget anything, but had complete control over what you remembered—and when?

Soon, you will be able to. You will have the capacity for Total Recall. You will be able to summon up everything you have ever seen, heard, or done. And you will be in total control, able to retrieve as much or as little as you want at any given time.

Right now, if someone had even a single photo from each day of her life, we would be amazed. But soon you will be able to record your entire life digitally. It’s possible, affordable, and beneficial.

If you choose, you’ll be able to create this digital diary or e-memory continuously as you go about your life. This will be nearly effortless, because you’ll have access to an assortment of tiny, unobtrusive cameras, microphones, location trackers, and other sensing devices that can be worn in shirt buttons, pendants, tie clips, lapel pins, brooches, watchbands, bracelet beads, hat brims, eyeglass frames, and earrings. Even more radical sensors will be available to implant inside your body, quantifying your health. Together with various other sensors embedded in the gadgets and tools you use and peppered throughout your environment, your personal sensor network will allow you to record as much or as little as you want of what happens to you and around you.

If you choose, everything you see can be automatically photographed and spirited away into your personal image library within your e-memory. Everything you hear can be saved as digital audio files. Software can allow you to scan your pictures for writing and your audio files for words to come up with searchable text transcripts of your life. If you choose, you can save every e-mail you send and receive and archive every Web page you visit. You can record your location and path through the world. You can record every rise and dip in your heart rate, body temperature, blood sugar, anxiety, arousal, and alertness, and log them into your personal health file.

The coming world of Total Recall will be as dramatic a change in the coming generation as the digital age has been for the present generation. It will change the way we work and learn. It will unleash our creativity and improve our health. It will change our intimate relationships with loved ones both living and dead. It will, I believe, change what it means to be human.

Three streams of technology are coming together to make the world of Total Recall a reality. First, and perhaps most important, we are recording more and more of our lives digitally without even trying. Digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are the vanguard of technology that is generating an explosion of digital records of our daily lives. Digital sensing and recording will become ubiquitous. Second, this mountain of new personal digital records can now be stored more cheaply than can easily be imagined—for about two hundred dollars you can own enough memory to store everything you read, everything you hear, and ten pictures a day for your whole life. Third, technologies enabling you to search, analyze, and present all kinds of reports from such large mountains of data are being developed, with astonishing results. Google will by no means be the last extraordinarily successful company to be built on new search technologies. So, we live in a world with more digital memories, more space to store them, and better and better technology to recollect them. The world of Total Recall is inevitable for these three reasons.

With the same ease with which you can now search for just about any subject on the Web, you will be able to search your own electronic memory for any arbitrary item of knowledge you have ever encountered, any snippet of conversation to which you have ever been party, any document that has ever passed before your eyes, any place you have ever visited, any person you have ever met. You become the librarian, archivist, cartographer, and curator of your life.

The ability to recover particular events, names, faces, and words is just the most obvious benefit of the Total Recall revolution. Software will allow you to sort and sift through your digital memories to uncover patterns in your life you could never have gleaned with your unaided brain. Your work habits, your leisure habits, and your spending habits; your emotional response patterns in various situations and around certain people; the numerous subtle factors that affect your mental well-being and your physical health; and just about anything else you care to know about yourself can be chronicled, condensed, cross-correlated, and plotted out for you in useful and illuminating ways. Your goals and achievements for time management, budgeting, and balancing all aspects of your life, work, and health can be tracked through progress charts you set up for yourself. Having access to such detailed and personally relevant feedback is one of the most potent spurs to motivation and productivity to be had.

Now imagine a complete digital record of your life, a complete e-memory of your time on earth. Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Mozart, Edison, and Einstein are dead but their ideas, their deeds, and their personalities have achieved a sort of immortality. Few aspire to be remembered along with history’s great characters, but by recording your life digitally you have the opportunity to bequeath your own ideas, deeds, and personality to posterity in a way never before possible. With such a body of information it will be possible to generate a virtual you even after you are dead. Your digital memories, along with the patterns of fossilized personality they contain, may be invested into an avatar (a synthesized persona) that future generations can speak with and get to know. Imagine asking your great-grandfather about what he really loved about your great-grandmother. Your digital self will reach out to touch lives in the future, allowing you to make an impact for generations to come.

The era of Total Recall is dawning, whatever you personally choose to do with the technology. You may embrace full-scale “life logging,” and devote much effort to maximizing your e-memories, or you may prefer to record your activities only modestly and selectively, or even reject the whole idea and strive to leave as small a digital life-footprint as possible. People felt and continue to feel disdain for the Internet and even personal computers. Some of us don’t want a cell phone. No matter. Whether you are an early adopter, a late adopter, or a never-in-a-million-years nonadopter, society at large is on an inexorable path toward Total Recall technology and it is going to transform the world around you. The power of this transformation will be awesome.

THE E-MEMORY MACHINES

Total Recall is arriving in a blaze of innovation. There are ever more ways being developed and packaged for gathering information from the world and from our lives and putting it to myriad uses. People the world over are gabbing, texting, picture-taking, video-capturing, and Web-surfing on their cell phones. Phones and cameras can now send pictures automatically to a Web site where they can be grouped, culled, and annotated later. Parents take zillions of hours of video footage of their children with pocket-size cameras that dump directly into their home computers. Casual joggers can now analyze their performance at levels once reserved for world-class runners, tracking their metabolic burn rates and the lengths, times, and elevation profiles of their runs using small, affordable devices worn on their bodies. You can buy a bathroom scale that automatically sends your weight to an encrypted Web site where you can examine your progress (or lack thereof) in cold, hard, objective numbers. College students can time-sync their typed notes to their audio recording of a lecture, allowing them to relisten to part of the lecture later by clicking on one of their notes.

This cornucopia of information-gathering devices continues to grow in size and diversity while the devices themselves continue to grow smaller, cheaper, and more multifunctional. Meanwhile the cost of digital memory continues its exponential descent. When it comes to recording information, the technology stream is gushing toward ubiquity and saturation, toward a world in which price and convenience will no longer be factors when deciding what or whether to record. Indeed, we are headed toward a world where it will require a conscious decision (or a legal requirement) not to record a certain kind of information in a certain time or place—the exact reverse of how things are now. The technological and economic forces driving this trend are strong. Arguably, only a vast legal or political effort of social engineering can prevent it from effecting far-reaching changes in the way modern life is lived. That sort of catastrophic counterrevolution sounds far-fetched, but there are more realistic scenarios that I will discuss in Chapter 8.

E-memories will provide every person who embraces them with a different sense of their whole lives. It won’t erase human nature’s capacity for self-deception, but it will surely make the truth of what we did and what happened around us more available, clearer, and less obscured by nostalgic make-believe. The benefits will also be distinctly practical. In the chapters ahead I will describe these benefits in the workplace, to our health, and in our capacity for learning. Higher productivity, more vitality and longer life spans, deeper and wider knowledge of our world and ways to accomplish things in it—these are all wonderful practical consequences of this coming technological revolution. But there will also be psychological implications. Enhanced self-insight, the ability to relive one’s own life story in Proustian detail, the freedom to memorize less and think creatively more, and even a measure of earthly immortality by being cyberized—these are all potentially transformational psychological phenomena.

But is it really feasible to record everything that happens in a person’s life? Shockingly perhaps, the memory needed to store a person’s lifetime of recorded experience is already here and affordable and is always growing cheaper. The rate of price decrease is given by Moore’s Law, which states that the transistor density that can be etched onto the silicon wafer of a microchip doubles every two years. This means that every two years, the cost of computer memory is cut in half—so you can afford to buy twice as much as last year. Moore’s Law was first published in 1965 and has held up with remarkable consistency ever since.

The growth of digital storage capacity has been staggering. In 1970, a disk that could store twenty megabytes (twenty million bytes) was the size of a washing machine and cost twenty thousand dollars. Today a terabyte (one trillion bytes) costs a hundred dollars and is the size of a paperback book. By 2020 a terabyte will cost the same as a good cup of coffee and will probably be in your cell phone. One hundred dollars will then buy you around 250 terabytes of storage, enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs. This should satisfy most lifeloggers’ recording needs for an entire life.

In fact, digital storage capacity is increasing faster than our ability to pull information back out. Once upon a time, you had to be extremely judicious and stingy about which pieces of data you hung on to. You had to be thrifty with your electronic pieces of information, or bits, as we call them. But starting around 2000 it became trivial and cheap to sock away tremendous piles of data. The hard part is no longer deciding what to hold on to, but how to efficiently organize it, sort it, access it, and find patterns and meaning in it. This is a primary challenge for the engineers developing the software that will fully unleash the power of Total Recall.

Where is the desktop PC in this Total Recall revolution? Its impending downfall has been predicted by Silicon Valley denizens for years. I believe the PC is destined for a demotion but is unlikely to vanish. The
P
in
PC
will still stand for “personal”—in fact, it will be more personal than ever before, involved in every aspect of your life. But the
C
will change from
computer
to
computer ecosystem
. Your desktop computer will be just one of many tools at your disposal for e-memory management. You will own an assortment of small, fungible, more modest computers—in fact, you probably already do. They are in your cell phone, in your appliances, and in your car. Increasingly, they will be in your clothes and on your body. They will be virtually everywhere.

C
will also stand for
cloud
. This refers to a new way of using the Internet in which data gets stored and software is run “out there” in the abstract ether of cyberspace—in the cloud—rather than locally on your own PC. Ultimately, the cloud turns information processing and storage into a metered utility just like electricity and water (with the difference that there will be many free offerings). It’s like having the power of computers “on tap.”

With cloud computing, your data becomes untethered from particular devices. Your e-memory follows you wherever you go, accessible from any device you happen to be using. You, not your desktop’s hard drive, are the hub of your digital belongings. Many of us experience this now with our e-mail, which we access from our desktop PC, our notebook PC, our smartphones, or any device we might borrow with a Web browser. Increasingly, everything in your e-memory will be accessible anywhere, anytime, from any device at hand.

Of course, many of your devices will have vast storage; your cell phone will hold more than a terabyte, and your notebook computer will carry more than two hundred terabytes. So think of every device you own as part of the cloud too. You can tap into a service provider, but you can also tap your home servers, your portable devices, and possibly those of your friends (they may keep a backup copy for you). And chances are that a copy of most things you will want will already be there in your notebook or cell phone.